Lester has spent a great deal of his time in passing on the writers’ tribal lore to newcomers. One of them was a brash young Ohio fan named Harlan Ellison. When Harlan heard I was writing these notes, he demanded equal time.
This is what he said:
I arrived in New York in late 1955; I was notable for two qualities: a relentless determination to be a professional writer, and squeaky-clean poverty. I had no place to live. Lester and his wonderful wife, the late Evelyn del Rey, took me in for a couple of weeks till I could find digs in the city. Sitting at the del Keys’ dining room table, using the bartered Royal portable that had been virtually the only thing I’d salvaged when I’d been kicked out of Ohio State University a few months previous, I wrote my first story. Lester was unfailingly helpful. He would walk up behind me, read what I’d typed, see it was syntactically crippled, and bat me across the back of the head. “Not who, dummy! Whoml” He provided auctorial tips, he showed me how to cobble up the extrapolative science that would make my specious concepts work, he edited the manuscript. Ewie fed me.
After Algis Budrys and Andre Norton, who were the first writers to take an interest in me, Lester was the one who got me started thinking and writing as a professional. He wasn’t kind, he was murderous; and that is a brutal treasure more valuable than all the strokes given by well-intentioned and inept amateurs who do not perceive one one-millionth as clearly as Lester did that writing is a killing craft, and only the tough survive and prevail.
For that savaging, I will always love and honor Lester.
A decade or so ago, Lester and I were comparing notes in the ril-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours way writers have when they suspect they may be up for the same prize.
Each year the World Science Fiction Convention selects some figure from the field to be its official Guest of Honor. Neither Lester nor I had ever been. The convention that would vote on it was coming up. The committee for the city that gets the convention picks its GoH, and they keep it secret until, and unless, they win the bid.
And it turned out that, in fact, we were competing for the honor that year. What I told Lester at the tune was true: I surely would enjoy being it. But if I had to lose, there wasn’t anybody in the field I’d rather lose to.
Of course, I confess, I felt pretty easy at being generous about it. The odds were on my side. Several cities were bidding for the convention. Two of them had asked me to be their Guest of Honor, and only one had asked Lester.
The trouble with betting with the odds is that the odds don’t always pay off. Lester’s people won. He got the honor, and I had to skulk in darkness for several more years before emerging into glory in Los Angeles. But that’s Lester for you. He makes a liar of the odds-layers every time.
He beat the odds for his own life some years back, against all the wisdom of medical science. The name of what happened to him is thromboeytopenia purpura. It is a disease, and an uncommon one. When it happens at all, it happens to tiny babies. When babies do develop it, the victims are usually female. I will attempt to describe this for you, if you will pardon the use of technical medical terms: For some reason or other, all the platelets in the blood say, “Ah, screw it,” at once. They stop clotting. The victim bleeds to death.
When grown male Lester del Rey’s platelets did this he was in his forties, and the local doctors competed vigorously for the chance to attend this medical marvel—right away, because they didn’t think a lot of his chances of surviving. They said, “Don’t cut yourself, don’t bump yourself, and, above all, for God’s sake, don’t sneeze.” Lester humored them to that extent. He didn’t sneeze. But he didn’t die, either. He was one of the vanishingly small number of male adults who contract the disease in the first place, and the even tinier number who survive it to make a full recovery. Doctors don’t know how he managed this, but I do. It was his stubbornness. He just didn’t feel like dying then.
Let me give you an example of what a person like Lester can do against the odds when he sets his mind to it. I swear every word of this is true.
You know that the Apollo Project, which put the first man on the Moon, began shortly after the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961.
Well, there is a novel by Lester del Rey (under his penname Philip St. John) called Rocket Jockey. It was published in 1951.
The space program had hardly begun when he was writing it, and Commander Neil Armstrong, who was to take that first great step for mankind a few years later, was still just another Navy pilot with the hope of someday sailing space. More than that. Sputnik and Vostok had made the American space program look pretty silly, and as far as anyone could tell, when that first man did walk on the Moon it was likely that the first message he would radio home might be in Russian.
Nevertheless—
Nevertheless the first sentence of that novel is fascinating. Many science-fiction stories have predicted future events. Few have been as uncannily exact,[1] even to names, as this opening sentence:
“The first spaceship landed on the Moon, and Commander Armstrong stepped out.”
Now do you understand why they call him The Magnificent?
Helen O’Loy
I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.
“Man, isn’t she a beauty?”
She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.
“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen… Mmmm… Helen of Alloy.”
“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”
“Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broacast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.
Dave and I hadn’t gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to practice medicine, I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After that, we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin, he found the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.
When our business grew better, we rented a house out near the rocket field—noisy but cheap, and the
rockets discouraged apartment building. We liked room enough to stretch ourselves. I suppose, if we hadn’t quarreled with them, we’d have married the twins in time. But Dave wanted to look over the latest Venus-rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn. From then on, we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.
But it wasn’t until “Lena” put vanilla on our steak instead of salt that we got off on the subject of emotions and robots: While Dave was dissecting Lena to find the trouble, we naturally mulled over the future of the mechs. He was sure that the robots would beat men some day, and I couldn’t see it.