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rout, and now to the numbed and tortured senses of the two innocent and suffering causes of
the entire mess came a roaring and confused shouting from the street
Men and women were pouring out of the neighboring houses, horses were bolting. Fire
engines clanged down the street, only to be abandoned by their riders. Squadrons of police
came and left.
Sills and Taylor finally gave up, and clad only in trousers, ran pell-mell for the Hudson. They
did not stop until they found themselves neck-deep in water, with blessed, pure air above
them.
Taylor turned bewildered eyes to Sills. "But how could it emit that horrible odor? You said it
was stable and stable solids have no odors. It takes vapor for that, doesn't it?"
"Have you ever smelled musk?" groaned Sills. "It will give off an aroma for an indefinite
period without losing any appre- ciable weight. We've come up against something like that."
The two ruminated in silence for a while, wincing when- ever the wind brought a vagrant waft
of Ammonium vapor to them, and then Taylor said in a low voice, "When they finally trace the
trouble to the spoon, and find out who made it, I'm afraid we'll be sued or maybe thrown in
jail."
Sills' face lengthened. "I wish I'd never seen the damned stuff! It's brought nothing but
trouble." His tortured spirit gave way and he sobbed loudly.
Taylor patted him on the back mournfully. "It's not as bad as all that, of course. The
discovery will make you famous and you'll be able to demand your own price, working at any
industrial lab in the country. Then, too, you're a cinch to win the Nobel Prize."
'That's right," Sills smiled again, "and I may find a way to counteract the odor, too. I hope
so."
"I hope so, too," said Taylor feelingly. "Let's go back. I think they've managed to remove the
spoon by now."
THE END
It should be quite obvious to anyone reading "The Mag- nificent Possession" that I was
majoring in chemistry in college at the time. As supposed humor, it is much more
embarrassing on rereading than "Ring Around the Sun" is. Imagine having a Congressman
named "Hornswoggle" and having gangsters speak in a ridiculous, misspelled version of
Brooklyn slang.
"The Magnificent Possession" was the only one of the first nine stories I wrote that
Campbell never saw, and I'm glad of that.
In early December I wrote a story I called "Ad Astra," and on December 21, 1938 (my
father's forty-second birthday, though I don't recall thinking of it as an omen one way or the
other), I went in to submit it to Campbell. It was my seventh visit to his office, for 1 had not yet
missed a month, and it was the ninth story I submitted to him.
"Ad Astra" is the first story I wrote for which I remember, even after all this time, the exact
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circumstances of the initiating inspiration. That fall, I applied for and received a National
Youth Administration (NYA) job designed to help me through college. I received fifteen
dollars a month, if memory serves me, in return for a few hours of typing. The typing I did was
for a sociologist who was writing a book on the subject of social resistance to technological
innova- tion. This included everything from the resistance of the early Mesopotamian
priesthood to the dissemination of the knowledge of reading and writing among the general
popula- tion, down to objections to the airplane by those who said heavier-than-air flight was
impossible.
Naturally it occurred to me that a story might be written in which social resistance to space
flight might play a small part. It was because of that that I used "Ad Astra" as the title. This
was from the Latin proverb "Per aspera ad astra" ("Through difficulties to the stars").
For the first time, Campbell did more than simply send a rejection. On December 29, I
received a letter from him asking me to come in for a conference to discuss the story in
detail.
On January 5, 1939, I went to see Campbell for the eighth time and for the first time at his
specific request. It turned out that what he liked in the story was the social resistance to
space flight the space flight itself was, of course, run of the mill.
Rather daunted, for I had never before had to revise a story to meet editorial specification, I
went to work. I brought in the revised story on January 24, and on January 31 I discovered
the system used by Campbell in accepting stories. Though his rejections were usually
accompanied by long and useful letters, his acceptances consisted of a check only, without
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