These stories are all from Galaxy (except for the one

which was in 1[, which really is the same thing). The

birth and growth of Galaxy was the most important single

element in my science fiction career except, of course, for

my meeting in the late 30s with John Campbell.

Galaxy was Horace L. Gold s creation and for a time,

I think, his life. When word went out that he had a new

magazine, he was flooded, deluged, swamped, with manu-

scripts. He gave half of them to the late Groff Conklin

and half to me. Groff and I read them and wrote com-

ments, and then swapped our piles of paper. They then

went back to Horace, who read them all and did the final

selections. I don t know how he did it. I don t know how

he did anything in those days; he wasn t well, and he was

carrying burdens and undergoing stresses the like of which

have foundered many a well man. Yet in all the years he

ran Galaxy, he met his deadlines, he paid his writers, and

he consistently refused to buy inferior work from his

closest friends. What more could anyone want of an

editor?

(I hear a voice from the fog crying, "I damn well want

an editor who will keep his blue pencil the hell off my

story!" and it is true that from time to time he made

changes, and among these, there were alterations that

drove certain writers and a reader or two straight up the

wall. I learned, however, that if I had a certain turn of

phrase or a sequence that 1 didn t want him to mess with,

1 would write "stet" in the margin--a printer s term which

means "run it as it stands." And he never failed to respect

it.)

Horace was an editor-in-depth, by which I mean that

his concern went a good deal further than the black

marks on white paper. He eonaldered the source---con-

siderately. Just one example:

A writer, from time to time, trips up on the convolu-

tions of his own literary intestines and falls flat; can t

move, can t write. That happened to me because of the

machinations of a maverick senator. His hi-iinks struck

me in a special way. Think of Asimov s dictum that there

are three kinds of science fiction: What If--, If Only--,

and If This Goes On. My preoccupation has always been

the latter, and applied to what I saw was happening in the