The Bureaucrat

By Malcolm Jameson and John Betancourt

Bullard was a Grand Admiral now, and the red tape of high position bound him—they thought!—so tight he couldn't do a friend a favor. But what's a knowledge of high strategy for but to outmaneuver trouble?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781479470495

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

THE BUREAUCRAT

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2021 by Wildside Press LLC.

All rights reserved.

The Bureaucrat originally appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1944.

Copyright © 1944, 1972 by Street & Smith.

INTRODUCTION

Malcolm Jameson (1891–1945) was an American science fiction author who based much of his work on his background as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Jameson’s first published fiction appeared in Astounding in 1938. He was active in American pulp magazines for only 7 years, but he helped set the standard for quality during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He wrote not just for John W. Campbell’s magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds, but also for magazines like Startling Stories and Weird Tales. His writing career began when complications from throat cancer limited his activity.

His stories of Solar System exploration about Bullard of the Space Patrol were posthumously collected in 1951 as a fixup novel and won the Boys Clubs of America Award. Reviewing that collection, critics Boucher and McComas praised Bullard as the most successfully drawn series character in modern science fiction. P. Schuyler Miller wrote that Jameson drew on his own naval experience to give the stories a warm atmosphere of reality.

Jameson’s story Doubled and Redoubled may be the earliest work of fiction to feature a time loop. And his story Blind Alley from Unknown was filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone (retitled Of Late I Think of Cliffordville).

Alfred Bester described meeting Jameson in about 1939 this way: Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties... Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-oriented space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter, who turned everybody’s head.

Had he lived another 20 years, the shape of the science fiction field might have been significantly different, with Jameson’s name up there with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and van Vogt.

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

THE BUREAUCRAT

The young man strode through endless corridors with the confident bearing of one sure of his right. Most of the guards who stopped him were satisfied with his ident and the uniform he wore. To those who doubted he tossed the formula he had tested earlier and found to work.

I am bearer of a personal message to Grand Admiral Bullard, he would say, and hurry on as if already late.

That sufficed to pass him through the many red tape wound barriers of the vast Defense Building in the bowl of Tycho Crater. It worked well even in the first half-mile of the northwestern wing. But when he came up to the partition where hung the sign Chief of the Bureau of Spatial Strategy, his boldness began to ebb. Facing him, seated at a receptionist’s desk, was a grim-faced, battle-scarred three-striper. And he wore the aigulettes of a personal aide.

Young Benton slowed his pace, and tried to gauge the man who now sat athwart his way. The rows of iridescent ribbons on his breast and the golden shoulder loops indicated that he was no ordinary receptionist. He was on Bullard’s staff probably because he had fought many a campaign by the side of that fabulous man himself, and surely had access to his senior’s mind. No flimsy generality was likely to get by his guard.

Benton faltered. He bore a message, to be sure, but the man it was for was hardly more to him than a legend, while the man who had given it to him had been dead for five years. Would the admiral receive