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There is one small catch: no kind of matter known can withstand the pressure of Jupiter without smashing, and no Jovian spaceship can leave Jupiter without exploding. In the final scene, however, a human inventor develops a spaceship hull made incredibly strong by a force field that can be maintained because it flicks on and off, stroboscopically, eight hundred thousand times a second. "Victory Unintentional," the sequel to "Not Final!," is summarized in Chapter 3.
At this point in his writing career, Asimov's robot stories were well established and his Foundation stories were beginning to be published. "Nightfall" had given him a cover on Astounding, and he was being published in that magazine with some regularity. He had no reason to believe that he could make a living as a writer, but the writing was a great help to his bank account he was paying his tuition as well as some other expenses although still living at home. In 1942, while he was continuing his graduate work in chemistry at Columbia (having passed on the second try his qualifying examinations to undertake research), he experienced his first dry spell. It was fourteen months before he returned to his typewriter and then only on a limited basis.
He had good reasons for his temporary abandonment of what had seemed like unimaginable success a year or two before: his research toward his Ph.D. consumed time and energy, he met and fell in love with Gertrude Blugerman, whom five months later he persuaded to marry him, and he applied for and accepted a job at the Naval Air Experimental Station of the U.S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia, where Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp already were at work. After "Author! Author!," which was sold to Astounding's companion fantasy magazine, Unknown, but not published until 1964 in an anthology of Unknown stories because of the magazine's untimely death, and "Death Sentence" (Astounding, November 1943), Asimov wrote only one story during the rest of the war years that was not a Foundation story or a robot story.
That story was "Blind Alley" (Astounding, March 1945), and, in spite of Asimov's resolve to stay away from areas of dispute with Campbell, it was about aliens. Two aspects of the story, however, must have pleased Campbell: the aliens were non-threatening, a dying race that had specialized in the biological sciences as well as psychology and psychiatry, and once they came into contact with humans (in the period of the thriving Galactic Empire), all the humans' efforts could not keep them from eliminating themselves by voluntarily having no offspring. The other pleasing aspect was the solution to the problem: an opportunity for the aliens to speed off to the Magellanic Clouds and a galaxy of

 
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