Les Tina held her military post until 1967, using her writing and organizational talents to serve as a public relations officer and the producer of Soldier Shows in Europe. She married and divorced Pohl in the mid-1940s, taking classes in “theater and paranormal psychology” before settling down with her third husband, Major Raymond E. Johnson, in 1952 (Pohl, Way 152–53). During this period Les Tina established herself as an author of romance, domestic comedy, and children’s novels while teaching elementary and adult classes on psychical research and creative writing. When Johnson’s work took them to Tunisia and Iran, she researched and published a college textbook on the Armenian people. In the 1980s Les Tina and her husband returned to San Diego, where she remained involved with gardening and amateur astronomy until a “short, courageous battle with cancer” ended her life in 2003 (Romubio).

  Les Tina’s first professional SF sale—“When You Think That … Smile!”—is both a classic SF thought-variant tale and an incisive feminist critique of gender relations. Revolving around one man’s reaction to the magical tobacco that endows him with telepathy, “When You Think That … Smile!” draws on psychology and sociology to consider the complexities of subjectivity that lie beneath the civility and incivility of everyday life. Like her fellow Futurian Leslie Perri in “Space Episode,” Les Tina takes particular advantage of the thought-variant story’s speculative nature to assess contemporary gender relations with a critical eye. As the narrator’s favorite domestic ritual, pipe smoking, is transformed by his special new tobacco, so too are his perceptions of the people who surround him. In particular, Les Tina is careful to map the narrator’s changing relations to his wife and the institution of marriage as a whole, providing readers with an object lesson about the interdependencies of families and the need to respect women’s work maintaining them. In many ways, then, “When You Think That … Smile!” is a bridge between the feminist-socialist utopian works of early-twentieth-century authors such as Leslie F. Stone and Lilith Lorraine, which explored how new domestic technologies might transform gender relations, and the midcentury “women’s SF” pioneered by Judith Merril and Alice Eleanor Jones that treated the family and the home as a focusing lens through which to explore the relations of science, society, and sex.

  “When You Think That … Smile!”

  Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1943

  It began the night I suddenly looked up from my newspaper and stared accusingly at my wife, Martha. I took my pipe out of my mouth. “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up. She had been knitting a sweater—now she knitted her brows.

  “What’s the idea thinking that about my mother?” I snapped. “Yours is no prize, not even at a rummage sale.”

  “Well!” Martha exploded. “Well, that’s nice! I haven’t said a word, just sat here inhaling your pipe’s b.o., all evening, keeping busy—”

  “Your mind’s been busy, all right! I know you don’t like my mother, but at least you might quit picturing her in your mind as being tied to a stake while you jab her with your knitting needles—”

  My wife was speechless. Which was unusual in itself. But the unaccustomed quiet didn’t warn me—I only saw with oratorical relish that the wavelength was clear for my continued broadcast.

  “And another thing,” I went on severely, “I know you’re planning on some more pants-pocket piracy tonight after I’m asleep. So you lost your allowance at the bridge game yesterday. Why don’t you tell me you’re broke? Why not be honest about it? And, by the unhappy way, why didn’t you mention having scraped the fender of the car today—”

  Martha suddenly found her voice. Or maybe it was somebody else’s … It didn’t sound like hers.

  “How do you know all those things?” she asked in an awed whisper.

  “Why, I … I—” I broke off and looked at her. Yes, how did I know about them? She hadn’t told me. I hadn’t even seen the car—but still I knew what had happened.

  “I don’t know how I know what I know,” I finished lamely. I looked up at her and added, “No, I didn’t call up the bridge girls to find out if you lost. And my mother hasn’t been talking to me about you. And—”

  My voice jolted to a halt. Martha’s eyes were round and panicky.

  “You’re saying what I’m thinking,” she said in a low voice. “You’re reading my mind …”

  “Nonsense,” I told her gruffly.

  I knocked the ashes out of my pipe into the tub that held our rubber plant and filled up the bowl again from my tobacco pouch. The pungent odor of the shredded leaf pleased me. It was good tobacco. A new blend. I liked it. Little, insignificant thoughts like these wheeled around in my brain. Because I didn’t want to think the truth. I didn’t want to believe what Martha had said.

  But I looked at her again, and knew that she was annoyed that I had put my pipe ash in the tub, and also that she was frightened and confused.

  “All right,” I said slowly, “so I read your mind. Haven’t you ever heard that people who live together a long time get—well—in tune mentally, or something like that, and they can guess what the other person is thinking?”

  “You didn’t guess … You knew!” Martha pointed out.

  She had me there.

  Shades of Houdini, I thought, what’s happened to me? I fixed Martha with an eye I tried to keep steady.

  “Think of something, anything,” I ordered. “As peculiar as you can.”

  She thought of eating broiled lobster for breakfast. That did it. There was no getting around it, after that. I definitely, uncomfortably, could read her mind.

  I told her so, laughing a little shakily. I found I could sense every shade of her thoughts.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like meeting people. They wouldn’t know about me—and no matter how polite they were, no matter how gracious … they wouldn’t be able to make their minds polite. The thing had possibilities. But how had it happened? I’m no mystic … The closest I’ve ever been to a séance is a Ouija board. I’m not a student of the occult. Or any other cult, for that matter.

  “Think of something else,” I asked Martha.

  She thought of taking me to a psychiatrist.

  “None of that,” I told her. “You’re not going to get me under a microscope.

  This thing has happened, no matter how, and I’m not going to have somebody poking around in my subconscious.”

  “In fact,” I went on, thoughtfully drawing on my pipe, “the only thing to do is take a philosophical attitude about it. It’ll come in mighty handy. Say, wouldn’t I make a lawyer, though? Or a detective? I’ll have to think that over. I could even go into vaudeville. I wouldn’t need any stooge to give me hidden clues …”

  I mused a bit. I was bewildered but excited. This was something indeed!

  “I still can’t believe it. Maybe it will go away,” Martha said hopefully.

  “Why do you want it to go away? I’m not such a tremendously gifted man that I can punch a sixth or seventh sense, or whatever this is, in the nose.”

  “I wish it hadn’t happened!” Martha’s voice was brittle. Martha was not pleased.

  “If wishes were Holsteins we’d all have cream on our cornflakes,” I observed airily. “Hah, you won’t be able to keep anything from me anymore!”

  “That’s what I mean,” she answered. “I won’t even be able to think in private.”

  I sucked on my pipe’s stem, found it was out, dropped it into my coat pocket, went to the closet and got my hat.

  I wriggled my fingers at Martha.

  “I’m going out for a while—want to find some new victims,” I told her. “Keep your mind out of the gutter … Remember, I’m the original know-it-all.”

  “Yes, you’re a know-it-all, all right,” she observed. She said it with a strained laugh. But there was fear in her eyes. “I can’t understand your taking it so calmly.”

  “I’m hardly calm,” I said. “And you can stop thinking about that new fur coat. We can’t afford it—”

  With that I went out and shut the door softly behind me, neatly severing in two Martha’s outraged voice.

  I stabbed the button for the elevator, and rocked back and forth on my heels while I waited. I thought about how nice it was to live in an apartment and have no lawn to cut. After I had exhausted that subject mentally my mind began to pick at the problem again. I mean, the problem. How and when had I changed from being an ordinary person into … Well, what had I changed into?

  I heard the elevator slowly and leisurely drawing itself up to my floor hand over hand. Or, I guess I should say, wheel over pulley.

  Sam, the milk-chocolate elevator boy, was sleepy. I caught a glimpse of a toothy yawn as the doors slid open. I stepped into the cube.

  “Good evening, Sam,” I said warily, “how are you tonight?”

  He was my first prospect.

  “Fine,” he said. He hunched his shoulders and yawned again.

  I knew he was not fine, I knew that he was sleepy, that he was hungry, and that he had lost six dollars in a crap game. The first two I might have guessed—but not the last.

  So, when we arrived at the lobby, I smiled innocently and asked, “Why didn’t you get out of the game when you were a ten-dollar winner, Sam?”

  He looked at me dolefully. “That was mah big mistake. Ah bin thinkin’ about that—”

  He broke off sharply and his chocolate bon-bon eyes showed a white edge.

  “How’d you know?” he asked in a furry whisper.

  I smiled. I was enormously pleased with myself.

  I produced that venerable, creaking saw that time has mellowed past the point of cleverness.

  “Sam,” I said, and winked, “a little bird told me.”

  I left him, then, and stepped confidently out onto the street.

  I had walked a block when a beggar stopped me, with that old wheeze about a nickel for a cuppa coffee. Ordinarily I would have given him a coin; now I gimleted him with my eye.

  “My good man, you have more money in the bank than I have. Let’s see … One thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine dollars, if I’m not wrong. And six cents,” I added, as he thought of it.

  The sidewalk might have been a magnet and his shoes metal to judge by the way he stood perfectly still and stared after me as I walked away. I had suspended his animation, temporarily.

  I filled up my pipe, saw that my tobacco was gone, and made a mental reservation to get more, if I could find the same little smoke shop. I sauntered along, puffing gently, like a locomotive on an easy grade.

  A swinging-hipped girl passed me. Her eyes were quick and bright and her lips were very red.

  “Nuh uh,” I murmured, and was gratified to see her nose elevate.

  Hey, this thought-reading business had its brighter side.

  I walked on, amusing myself by dabbling in the minds of the people who, unhappily for them, shared the sidewalk with me. I learned a lot about human nature. Too much. Some of it I didn’t like. I hadn’t known people thought such things. Well … not in just that way, anyway.

  I sighed and shook myself a little. Sometimes it’s better not to be too wise. The minds I read, on the whole, were not happy ones. Many of them were mean, selfish. Little minds. It was depressing.

  I decided to go home. I was weary of the game. I wanted to see Martha. I felt moody, restless.

  The apartment was quiet when I unlocked the front door and walked in.

  “Hi, Martha,” I called, “the mastermind is back!”

  No answer. And for a very good reason. There was no Martha. Instead there was a note pinned to one of the rubber plant’s leaves.

  I read it twice. And then I sat down and stared at it. But I wasn’t seeing it. I was seeing Martha’s eyes just before I left. The note was written hastily and to the effect that though I had been a dandy husband in the past … I wasn’t such great shakes at present. The gist of the thing was that no woman wants a man knowing what she’s thinking.

  So there I was—a louse without a spouse. And all because my brain cells had gone on a bender. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t deliberately short-circuit myself.

  She wasn’t very original. She had gone home to mother. But I wasn’t thinking about that. All I knew was that I missed her. More than I thought possible. I tried to call her—and got a phone hung up in my ear.

  I stood the emptiness of the apartment for about a half hour and then went out again. I was conveyed down in the elevator, as I had been conveyed up, by a respectful Sam.

  I made a mental note of his thoughts, but without interest. I didn’t care about anything but having Martha come back. And yet I was certain she wouldn’t as long as I stayed the way I was. But, for all I knew, I would never change. I thought of going to a doctor, but somehow I felt that wouldn’t help. What could I do, then?

  I slouched disconsolately along the street. Every time a person came near I drew back mentally. I didn’t want to know what they were thinking about. I had enough thoughts of my own to keep me busy.

  I took out my pipe, remembered I was out of tobacco, and put it away. Then I decided to find the smoke shop where I had bought it.

  I wandered up one street and down another. What to do? Wryly I decided that I would rather not be a mental giant if wifelessness went with it.

  Then I saw the tobacco shop across the street. I jaywalked and almost found myself in the market for a pair of wings and a secondhand harp. (I hear new harps come high.) The driver missed me, however, and I picked up some brand new certain-type words out of his mind.

  The shop was still open. It was a little place, wedged in between two many-storied buildings. It was lit by a single bulb in the ceiling.

  I pushed open the door and went inside. From the back hurried the small, wrinkled, Egyptian-looking owner.

  “Hello,” I said, “remember me? I bought some tobacco in here a couple of days ago. I’d like some more. It was a special blend, you said.”

  I looked at him with lackluster eyes. Idly I wondered what went on in the mind of such an odd-looking person. In a minute I would know. But nothing happened. Nothing at all!

  My heart took one leap and then settled down to a steady rhumba. I wasn’t able to read his mind! I had blown a fuse, or something.

  But he was talking fast, not giving me time to more than nod.

  “You the man?” he demanded. “You the man who bought that tobacco? That was a terrible thing I did. I made a mistake. That tobacco is very rare—imported from Turkey—and should not be smoked by everyone. Sometimes it affects them strangely. It’s unpredictable. A man can smoke it for a while without anything happening … And then, poof!” He made a motion with his hands. “Are you all right—no effects from it?”

  I smiled at him. “No,” I said cautiously, “I noticed nothing, only that I liked it. You can see for yourself. Will you sell me some more?”

  He looked relieved. Then doubtful. But I relied on the fact that not only does money talk—it gives an oration when there’s enough of it.

  So it was over. I could explain to Martha. I could prove to her, some way, that the gift was gone. She would be able to tell by my relief, if nothing else.

  For myself, I was glad I would be able to look at a person again and take him at his face value. I didn’t want to know right off what he thought—I wanted to find out a little at a time. It was easier on the nerves. And the illusions.

  Why, then, did I want more of the stuff? Well, they say it takes a smart man to understand a woman … Anytime Martha puzzled me overly … Well, there would always be my pipe … and the tobacco …

  * Because of his lack of technical knowledge, the writer has failed to explain the fundamental processes by which the rocket, when once out of the atmosphere of Earth, could hold and increase its speed as it flew through space.

  First, one must take into consideration Newton’s Third Law of Motion, i.e., “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”; that to push anything forward there must be a backward motion, just as a man in walking pushes with one foot backwards as he propels his body forward. In Professor Rollins’s rocket, this push is given by means of a “kick” from an explosive powder. This powder is confined in a strong steel chamber capable of resisting the pressure of the explosion, and the gases thereof are ejected through, or driven out of, the base of the cartridge through an expanding nozzle, a nozzle that resembles that of a steam turbine, and is designed to give the highest possible velocity to the gas. In this manner a great rate of speed can be obtained, each explosion adding acceleration to the speeding body.

  At the “shooting” of each cartridge of powder the chamber is thrown off, so that those kept are full ones. This gives the rocket less weight, and consequently greater velocity. So with each ejection of the gas the speed of the rocket has a twofold increase, and though the machine can start at a comparatively slow rate, the nearer it is to its destination the faster it is traveling. On sighting its destination the traveler will then shut off all power, so that the rocket will arrive in the atmosphere of the planet traveling only on the acquired momentum, and an easy landing can be made.

  On the rocket, weight, as it may be termed, would be greatly increased by the rapid acceleration at the start, but this was all calculated in advance and allowed for; the acceleration would also be under perfect control, being maintained by means of a time clock at just as great a degree as the passenger could stand.

  * The race of Gora, considered barbarians, whose skin and hair are bronze-like.

  * Gorans.

  * One ro is equivalent to two hours and ten minutes of Earth time.

  2

  POETS

  Speculative poetry—including SF, horror, fantasy, dark fantasy, speculative, and science verse—has long been part of the SF genre. It appeared in nearly every professional and amateur publication of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, a period that also marked the publication of the first two genre poetry anthologies: August Derlith’s edited Dark Side of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947) and Lilith Lorraine’s single-author chapbook, Wine of Wonder (1952). As the prominence of Lorraine’s name in this short history suggests, women made significant contributions to the development of speculative poetry. It was in poetry, perhaps more than anywhere else in the SF community, that women were recognized as tastemakers in the field. It was also in poetry—again, perhaps more than anywhere else in SF—that women made meaningful connections with one another. These connections crossed both space and time. Whether they wrote light verse or dark elegy, early women speculative poets often used the techniques first developed by their nineteenth-century predecessors to explore the most pressing scientific and social issues of their time. In doing so, they articulated the issues of gendered aesthetic vision and power relations that are still central to feminist speculative poetry.