"It's tonight or never," Diane said. "Yes," I said. I watched her as she walked back and forth across my bedroom floor. She had on a sheer plasto dress that clung to her round white breasts and full milky thighs. "I'm picking him up at the spaceway," she said. "We're supposed to go dining and dancing tonight." She stopped pacing. "It's my birthday. I'm thirty today." And I was twenty-four and in love. Six years between us. So what? I didn't give a damn. I wanted to marry her, to live with her. "I'm thirty," she said again. "Do you mind?" "I know your age. Why bring it up?" "Someday you'll find out you married an old woman. If we ever do marry." "Stop it." I got off the bed, went to her. "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it." "Do you love me?" she looked up...
Striding down the corridor on long thin legs, Art Fillmore mentally glanced over the news and his wide brow puckered. "Scientists to awaken twentieth century man," the mental beam proclaimed. "Dark age to yield untold volumes of ignorance." Fillmore paused before the twelve-foot door, closed his eyes and concentrated until he had achieved the proper attenuation, then entered the office without opening the door. The bald man in the reclining chair dropped his feet from the five-foot-high desk and sat up with a start. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Art," he said nervously. "You know I've got the itch." "Sorry," Fillmore apologized. "Wasn't thinking. Had my mind on my forthcoming wedding." "Wedding?" The bald man's narrow mouth dropped open, revealing small fragile teeth. "Why didn't you tell me? What does she look like?" "Haven't seen her yet," Fillmore grinned. "Just mental images, and you know how girls are when...
A fearsome thing is a thing you're afraid of—and it has nothing whatever to do with whether others are afraid, nor with whether it is in fact dangerous. It's your view of the matter that counts! There was a dizzy, sickening whirl of mental blackness—not true blackness, but a mind-enveloping darkness that was filled with the multi-colored little sparks of thoughts and memories that scattered through the darkness like tiny glowing mice, fleeing from something unknown, fleeing outwards and away toward a somewhere that was equally unknown; scurrying, moving, changing—each half recognizable as it passed, but leaving only a vague impression behind. Memories were shattered into their component data bits in that maelstrom of not-quite-darkness, and scattered throughout infinity and eternity. Then the pseudo-dark stopped its violent motion and became still, no longer scattering the fleeing memories, but merely blanketing them. And slowly—ever so slowly—the powerful cohesive forces that existed...
Frost tossed an avenil wrapper in the space erviser's part reducer. "These people have found the secret of immortality," he said. "What a romantic temperament you have," Scott replied softly. "'The secret of immortality,' it sounds as dated as the philosopher's stone." "What do you mean? We're not immortal." "No, we're not—though you may not have noticed that the last report of the committee for India gives the life expectancy there now as seventy years. And because of consistently good medical care, you and I both look a good ten years younger than our actual chronological age." Scott was in his early thirties: he had the trim body and resilient skin of first maturity. "That's not immortality." "No, of course not. That's what I'm driving at. How do we arrest aging and prolong life? With some mysterious serum, by some dark business with a fantastic ray? Hocus-pocus of a sort...
To the Reader of this Work: In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest. My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack. He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world. We all...
This world was a setup for any man who wanted to get along—provided one had enough victims to toss to the wolves! The Master Clock on the black desk in the office of Federal Executions made a quiet blipping sound. Immediately the lights lowered to Emote Neutral. Long, probing shadow fingers snaked here and there across the floor, and a silence that should have been restful—and wasn't—descended on the place. Tony Radek leaned back in his chair and frowned. One-fifteen in the morning. At one-fifteen in the morning no man, no matter who, should be going to his Neg-Emote. Why not hang a man instead? Or electrocute him? Or gas him the way they used to back in the old days? In those old days his grandfather used to talk about, where twelve ordinary citizens said the word that peeled the life off a man like skinning an onion. He...
ILLUSTRATED BY EMSH It was a very different thing, Algernon Weaver decided, actually to travel in space. When you read about it, or thought about it in terms of what you read, it was more a business of going from one name to another. Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to meditate on it—became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more understandable. Not that he had ever approved. No. He had that, at least, to look back upon; he had seen the whole enterprise as pure presumption, and had said so. Often. The heavens were the heavens, and Earth was Earth. It would have been better— much better for all concerned—if it had been left that way. He had held that opinion, he reminded himself...
They still talk of Braun, and the Fourth Intergalactic Survey. Other men before him had gone out into the far, dark places. Three previous expeditions had gone out and vanished completely. Then the Venture IV went out and out and out countless miles and light-years and whatever else it is—and out there in the lonely darkness something happened. Nobody knew exactly what happened, but there was a lot of guessing. Only one man came back. Braun. And there was talk.... Tending bar anywhere is better, they say, than an academic degree in psychology. Tending bar on one of the way stations to the stars you see people—most of them human—as they really are, and in all stages of emotion. You see them coming and going, and a few already gone. By little signs, you can tell a lot about them, and make a guess at what is wrong with the...
They say automation makes jobs, especially if "they" are trying to keep their own job of selling automation machines. I know the Actuarvac made one purple passion of a job for me, the unpleasantly fatal results of which are still lingering with me. Thad McCain, my boss at Manhattan-Universal Insurance, beamed over the sprawling automatic brain's silver gauges and plastic toggles as proudly as if he had just personally gave birth to it. "This will simplify your job to the point of a pleasant diversion, Madison." "Are you going to keep paying me for staying with my little hobby?" I asked, suspiciously eyeing my chrome competitor. "The Actuarvac poses no threat to your career. It will merely keep you from flying off on wild-goose chases. It will unvaryingly separate from the vast body of legitimate claims the phony ones they try to spike us for. Then all that remains is...
Alick Craven, who was something in the Foreign Office, had been living in London, except for an interval of military service during the war, for several years, and had plenty of interesting friends and acquaintances, when one autumn day, in a club, Francis Braybrooke, who knew everybody, sat down beside him and began, as his way was, talking of people. Braybrooke talked well and was an exceedingly agreeable man, but he seldom discussed ideas. His main interest lay in the doings of the human race, the “human animal,” to use a favorite phrase of his, in what the human race was “up to.” People were his delight. He could not live away from the centre of their activities. He was never tired of meeting new faces, and would go to endless trouble to bring an interesting personality within the circle of his acquaintance. Craven’s comparative indifference about society, his laziness...
Illustrated by Philip Parsons This planet was remote and set apart, and nothing about it had made William Kirk think he might find human life. Yet just beyond, through a thorny bush shaped like an exploding rose, Kirk had seen eyes and nose and a flash of yellow hair that were definitely human. Kirk poised motionless. He was three miles from the rocket and Leo, who was waiting inside of it. He thought for a moment of how Leo had told him, as they made their landing, that this is the kind of planet where you could go no further. This is the kind of planet that could be the end of twelve years, and you'd better be careful, William, old sport. Kirk noticed a faint breeze; his palms were wet, and they cooled when the breeze touched them. He placed his palms against his jacket. Damn you, Leo, he...
Dust lay thick along the road that led through the very heart of the native quarter of Mangadone; dust raised into a misty haze which hung in the air and actually introduced a light undernote of red into the effect. Dust, which covered the bare feet of the coolies, the velvet slippers of the Burmese, which encroached everywhere and no one regarded, for presently, just at sundown, shouting watermen, carrying large bamboo vessels with great spouts, would come running along the road, casting the splashing water on all sides, and reduce the dry powder to temporary mud. The main street of the huge bazaar in Mangadone was as busy a thoroughfare as any crowded lane of the city of London, and it blazed with colour and life as the evening air grew cool. There were shops where baskets were sold, shops apparently devoted only to the sale of mirrors, shops...
Low tinkling music awakened Amco. He stirred up out of semi-consciousness as the three-dim screen glowed purple. Lethargic nerves sharpened with intuitive sense of foreboding as the noble figure of the City's Coordinator appeared in the three-dim radius. The perfect, if characterless, features of the Coordinator were taut with strain. "We're confronted by a serious crisis, Amco," his voice said, and waited. Amco frowned. A crisis? How could perfection be confronted by crisis? The City was an ultimate City, colossal, tiers on tiers of intricacy that left nothing desired nor sought after. But— The last episode that could be termed crisis had been six centuries ago in 9400 when an armada of heavily armed ships from an alien cosmos tried an invasion of Dhoma and were annihilated. Could they be facing another such attack? If so, it was a form of offensive unpredictable by the most advanced Dhomastrial minds. He...
Goro put down his tools and relaxed into a pile of wood shavings, his back against a half-finished bathtub. To enjoy the evening cool, he told himself, wiping his face with a blue and white rag. Actually, he wanted to postpone the evening meal. Either the rice would be overcooked to a sticky goo or he would be picking hard, underdone kernels out of his teeth all night. And bean soup, when he made it, always had things swimming in it that had no business there. A night insect went weep-weep-weep . The sound, the night falling, and the thought of his own cooking made him think of his dead wife. "She was a good cook, poor thing," he thought out loud. "My, my—how I miss her." He gave a deep sigh. Oh, to have a wife again—a jolly, round wife and a good cook. Just like the old one...
Here's what happens when two Master Spies tangle ... and stay that way! "Nothing, nothing to get upset about," Pashkov said soothingly, taking his friend's arm as they came out of the villa forty miles from Moscow. Pashkov looked like a roly-poly zoo attendant leading a tame bear. "Erase his memory, give him a new name and feed him more patriotism. Very simple." Medvedev raised his hand threateningly. "Don't come howling to me if everybody guesses he is nothing but a robot." Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of Dentist Amigovitch , this house had become known all over the world as Boris Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the clicking of a typewriter. "It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them," he said, climbing into his flier. "Petchareff...
You too can be a Qurono. All you need do is geoplanct. All you need know is when to stop! Barnhart sauntered right into the middle of them. He covertly watched the crew close in around him and he never twitched an eyelash. Officers must never panic , he reminded himself, and manipulated the morning sighting on the nearest sun through the Fitzgerald lens. It was exactly 900:25:30, Galactic Time. He jotted the reading in, satisfied. The warm breath tickling the back of his neck was unnerving. If he showed fear and grabbed a blaster from the locker he could probably control them, but he was devastingly aware that a captain must never show fear. "Captain Barnhart," Simmons, the mate, drawled politely, "do you still plan on making the jump at 900 thirty?" The captain removed his eyeglasses and polished the lenses. "Simmons," he said in comforting, confiding tones, "you...
The fly rod, the letter and the small jar of paint were, in a sense, half of the problem Homer Hopkins had to solve. The other half rested in his complex mind. Fader's Fadeless Formulae had offered him a position, not a job, to take charge of its research department, at ten thousand a year, twice what he was paid at Faderfield Junior College to teach chemistry. All this was in the letter. "But I like being a teacher," said Homer. And he looked at the fly rod. "And I also like to fish." Teaching chemistry had left him little time for fishing. The science had advanced with such gigantic strides that Homer was continually catching up on the subject. He spent his vacations going to colleges, and his off days reading literature, orienting himself. The little jar of paint had brought it about. Homer had sent a jar like...
Sykes died, and after two years they tracked Gordon Kemp down and brought him back, because he was the only man who knew anything about the death. Kemp had to face a coroner's jury in Switchpath, Arizona, a crossroads just at the edge of the desert, and he wasn't too happy about it, being city-bred and not quite understanding the difference between "hicks" and "folks." The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense. Had there been great wainscoted walls and a statue of blind Justice, it would have been more impersonal and, for Kemp, easier to take. But this courtroom was a crossroads granger's hall in Switchpath, Arizona. The presiding coroner was Bert Whelson, who held a corncob pipe instead of a gavel. At their ease around the room were other men, dirt-farmers and prospectors like Whelson. It was like a movie short. It needed only a comedy dance number and...
By ROBERT ABERNATHY Illustrated by WEISS All younger generations have been going to the dogs ... but this one was genuinely sunk! "Junior!" bellowed Pater. " Junior! " squeaked Mater, a quavering echo. "Strayed off again—the young idiot! If he's playing in the shallows, with this tide going out...." Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror. No sign of Junior. Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, out of sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began. "Oh, oh," sobbed Mater. "He's lost. He's...
The day Lugert's criminals gunned down three citizens in a bold broad-daylight robbery, Domnas Karson, Third Speaker of the Council, said, "I think I've got the answer." "Answer? To what?" asked Murgon Darell Fourth Speaker. "To Lugert," said Karson. "The weapon we can use against that throwback who's terrorizing us all." Darell sighed wearily. "There is no answer to Lugert, I'm afraid. We're peaceful people; he's a throwback to a more violent age. There's no way to cope with him. Would you want to be the one to shoot him down?" Karson shuddered and said, "No, not me. Of course not. I'm no more capable of violence than anyone else. But Lugert can be stopped. We can get help." "From where?" "From the past," said Karson. "From the ugly crime-ridden world we've evolved out of. Dr. Lorence of the Science Council has developed a time-net which...." "Of course!" Darell exclaimed....
“Come, have another hand, Burgoyne.” “I’ll have my revenge to-morrow, old fellow,” I replied. “Why not to-night?” “It’s past two, and I’ve a long walk home, remember.” “Very well; as you wish.” My friend, Robert Nugent, a journalist, was young man, tall and dark, twenty-seven at the outside, with a pleasant, smiling face. His wavy hair, worn rather long, and negligence of attire gave him a dash of the genial good-for-nothing. It was in the card-room of that Bohemian—but, alas, now defunct—institution, the Junior Garrick Club, where we had been indulging in a friendly hand. Having finished our game, we ordered some refreshment, and seated ourselves upon the balcony on Adelphi Terrace, smoking our last cigarettes, and watching the ripple of the stream, the broken reflection of the stars, and many lights that lined the Thames. All was dark in the houses on the opposite shore; the summer wind whispered...
Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls. One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more. Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine. X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first. Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room...
The thing happened so suddenly that I really had very little time to make up my mind what course to adopt under somewhat singular circumstances. I was seated at my favorite table against the wall on the right-hand side in Stephano's restaurant, with a newspaper propped up before me, a glass of hock by my side, and a portion of the plat du jour , which happened to be chicken en casserole , on the plate in front of me. I was, in fact, halfway through dinner when, without a word of warning, a man who seemed to enter with a lightfooted speed that, considering his size, was almost incredible, drew a chair toward him and took the vacant place at my table. My glass of wine and my plate were moved with smooth and marvelous haste to his vicinity. Under cover of the tablecloth a packet—I could not tell...
The Albacore was eight hundred miles out of Suva, feeling her way through the Pacific toward a destination unmarked except on the charts. She was a Navy cruiser jury-rigged into a floating laboratory, Navy manned, but carrying a dozen specialized technicians as passengers. For days she had waited outside the danger area, till circling planes radioed word that the test atomic blast had apparently subsided. Then the Albacore went into a flurry of preparations. It was a miracle that the watch had sighted Gresham in his rubber boat, and a triple miracle that he was alive. His eyes bandaged, he sat out on deck, while Black, the neurologist, leaned on the rail beside him and stared aft. Presently Black took out a pack of cigarettes, automatically held it out to Gresham, and then remembered that the man was blind. “Cigarette?” he said. “Yes, thanks. Is that you, Dr. Black?” Gresham’s...
It cannot be said that the Everhard Manuscript is an important historical document. To the historian it bristles with errors—not errors of fact, but errors of interpretation. Looking back across the seven centuries that have lapsed since Avis Everhard completed her manuscript, events, and the bearings of events, that were confused and veiled to her, are clear to us. She lacked perspective. She was too close to the events she writes about. Nay, she was merged in the events she has described. Nevertheless, as a personal document, the Everhard Manuscript is of inestimable value. But here again enter error of perspective, and vitiation due to the bias of love. Yet we smile, indeed, and forgive Avis Everhard for the heroic lines upon which she modelled her husband. We know to-day that he was not so colossal, and that he loomed among the events of his times less largely than the...
"Will you give me a glass of water, please?" A ragged, bearded tramp stood before the door of a cottage near the outskirts of a country village, and propounded this question to a pretty girl who stood in the door. "In a moment." The girl disappeared, soon returning with a pitcher. She went to the pump near, and soon had the pitcher running over with sparkling water. "I will bring a cup." "Needn't mind." The tramp lifted the pitcher and quaffed the water as though he enjoyed it. His eyes were not pleasant as he turned them keenly on the pretty face of the girl. "Folks at home?" "No." "All alone, eh?" "Yes; but Ransom will be around soon—my brother." The eyes of the tramp glittered. He seemed to delight in reading the fresh young face before him. "Nobody at home, eh?" he grunted. "Mebbe I'd better go in and...
One of the spectacular exploits of Hawk Carse, greatest of space adventurers. awk Carse came to the frontiers of space when Saturn was the frontier planet, which was years before the swift Patrol ships brought Earth's law and order to those vast regions. A casual glance at his slender figure made it seem impossible that he was to rise to be the greatest adventurer in space, that his name was to carry such deadly connotation in later years. But on closer inspection, a number of little things became evident: the steadiness of his light gray eyes; the marvelously strong-fingered hands; the wiry build of his splendidly proportioned body. Summing these things up and adding the brilliant resourcefulness of the man, the complete ignorance of fear, one could perhaps understand why even his blood enemy, the impassive Ku Sui, a man otherwise devoid of every human trait, could not face Carse...
If scientific advance changes our forms of courtship, can other sports be far behind? Not when telekinesis is finally perfected! Before them the ball took a savage turn toward the player in white. Around Grant the crowd stood up and roared, and he felt suddenly tense and doubting. Then the player ducked, the ball shot through above him to smash against the court wall, and he controlled the rebound to send the sphere once more into erratic, darting flight. "Again!" Grant felt his muscles suddenly relax with release of anxiety. He turned to the girl. "Bee, I'm worried. It's not like Tony—does he want to get killed? He should stop those shots, not dodge them. Are you sure he's all right?" "Now, Granny." The girl kept her eyes fixed on the court. "Remember, Tony took this match for charity. He wants the crowd to have a show, that's all. He...
OR The Man Who Defied Nick Carter By NICHOLAS CARTER Author of “The Taxicab Riddle,” “Nick Carter’s Last Card,” “Bandits of the Air,” etc. STREET & SMITH PUBLICATIONS INCORPORATED 79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York Copyright, 1910 By STREET & SMITH A Stolen Name All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. Printed in the U.S.A. A STOLEN NAME. Bare-Faced Jimmy, so-called gentleman crook, expert cracksman, and a master criminal in any department of the underworld to which he cared to devote his attention, leaned backward in his chair until it tilted against the wall behind him, blew a cloud of Perfecto smoke ceilingward, and remarked: “It will be the easiest thing in the world, Juno. If the objective point were a fortune—even a moderate one; if the thing contemplated included the theft of a single dollar, in cash or in estate, it would be different;...