I found Johnny a few blocks from our hotel in a little bar that was nearly deserted. He was sitting alone at a table in a dark corner, staring morosely at nothing in particular, his hand limp around an almost-empty glass. He seemed perfectly sober, though his eyes stared glassily ahead. I sat down beside him. "What do you say we go back to the hotel, Johnny? Tomorrow's another slave day." His eyes shifted to me and then back to nothing. I wondered if he had actually seen me. "We can talk about it over some coffee and a bit to eat." I suggested, placing my hand on his arm. "Go to hell," he said quietly and shook me loose. He lifted his glass, drained the last few drops. He held the empty glass to the light, then set it down, regretfully. "But first buy me a drink." "You'd better...
Hayden was back in New York again after several years spent in the uttermost parts of the earth. He had been building railroads in South America, Africa, and China, and had maintained so many lodges in this or that wilderness that he really feared he might be curiously awkward in adapting himself to the conventional requirements of civilization. In his long roundabout journey home he had stopped for a few weeks in both London and Paris; but to his mental discomfort, they had but served to accentuate his loneliness and whet his longings for the dear, unforgotten life of his native city, that intimate, easy existence, wherein relatives, not too near, congenial friends and familiar haunts played so important a part. On the journey from London he had felt like a boy going home for the most delightful holidays after a long period in school, and to calm and render...
ILLUSTRATED BY BIRMINGHAM Joseph Mauser spotted the recruiting line-up from two or three blocks down the street, shortly after driving into Kingston. The local offices of Vacuum Tube Transport, undoubtedly. Baron Haer would be doing his recruiting for the fracas with Continental Hovercraft there if for no other reason than to save on rents. The Baron was watching pennies on this one and that was bad. In fact, it was so bad that even as Joe Mauser let his sports hovercar sink to a parking level and vaulted over its side he was still questioning his decision to sign up with the Vacuum Tube outfit rather than with their opponents. Joe was an old pro and old pros do not get to be old pros in the Category Military without developing an instinct to stay away from losing sides. Fine enough for Low-Lowers and Mid-Lowers to sign up with this...
lsewhere I have set down, for whatever interest they have in this, the 25th Century, my personal recollections of the 20th Century. Now it occurs to me that my memoirs of the 25th Century may have an equal interest 500 years from now—particularly in view of that unique perspective from which I have seen the 25th Century, entering it as I did, in one leap across a gap of 492 years. This statement requires elucidation. There are still many in the world who are not familiar with my unique experience. Five centuries from now there may be many more, especially if civilization is fated to endure any worse convulsions than those which have occurred between 1975 A.D. and the present time. I should state therefore, that I, Anthony Rogers, am, so far as I know, the only man alive whose normal span of eighty-one years of life has been spread...
It was time for the after-meal meditation. Marik, First Priest of Carthule, finished his frugal meal and went outside to sit in the mid-day breeze and watch the sands blowing gently over the bare flat plains. The problem of the Revelation occupied his reveries: why had Carthule, in His infinite wisdom, waited so long to reveal to His people that they were not alone in the universe? Marik looked up at the glowing dot behind the gray wall of the sky. That, he knew, was the Sun. And there were other planets, some inhabited, some not. Carthule was not alone; He was one of nine. And His people had never suspected the truth until the flaming ships of the third planet—Earth, was it?—had broken through the skies, and the small white people had told them of the other worlds. The problem was one which the greatest theologians of the time—in...
The knowledge I obtained by such general and varied practice, being always compelled to dispense my own prescriptions, was of course invaluable. But it was terribly uphill work, and a doctor’s drudge, as I was, can save no money. Appearances have always to be kept up, and one cannot put by very much on eighty or one hundred pounds a year. Indeed, one night, seven years after leaving Guy’s, I found myself again in London, wandering idly along the Strand, without prospects, and with only a single sovereign between myself and starvation. I have often reflected upon that memorable night. How different the world seemed then! In those days I was content to pocket a single shilling as a fee; now they are guineas, ten or more, for as many minutes of consultation. It was an unusually hot June, and the night was quite stifling for so early in summer....
I got the bad news as soon as we landed on Mars. The minute I got off the spacer, the little yellow Martie was standing there with a yellow envelope. He said, "Gladiator Jak Demsi?" I admitted it and he handed me the envelope. Made me feel kind of good, as though I was somebody important, which I'm not. I'd been taking plenty of guff on the trip. Not only from Suzi, but from Alger Wilde, who was also along. Yeah, between them they'd ridden me as well as the liner, all the way from Terra. I handed the Martie a kopek and put the yellow envelope in my pocket, as though I was used to getting spacegrams. I said to Suzi, "Let's hit the chow line." I don't usually talk that fancy, but I was trying to impress her with my knowledge of antique phrases. Both Suzi and Alger...
It was Mr. Ricardo's habit as soon as the second week of August came round to travel to Aix-les-Bains, in Savoy, where for five or six weeks he lived pleasantly. He pretended to take the waters in the morning, he went for a ride in his motor-car in the afternoon, he dined at the Cercle in the evening, and spent an hour or two afterwards in the baccarat-rooms at the Villa des Fleurs. An enviable, smooth life without a doubt, and it is certain that his acquaintances envied him. At the same time, however, they laughed at him and, alas with some justice; for he was an exaggerated person. He was to be construed in the comparative. Everything in his life was a trifle overdone, from the fastidious arrangement of his neckties to the feminine nicety of his little dinner-parties. In age Mr. Ricardo was approaching the fifties; in condition...
As pretty as a picture? Yes, because that was all she was ... or would become some day! My brother, Perry, always was a bit cracked. As a kid, he almost blew up our house doing experiments. When he was eighteen, he wrote poetry, but fortunately that didn't last long and he went back to science. Now, when he showed me this picture, I figured he'd had a relapse of some kind. "This is the girl I'm in love with," he said. She wasn't bad. Not bad at all, even if her clothes were crazy. She wasn't my type—too brainy-looking—although I could see how some guys would go for her. "I thought you liked blondes." "I wouldn't give you two cents for all the blondes in Hollywood," he answered. "This is the only girl for me." "You sound as if you've got it bad," I said. "You going to marry...
Tam's problem was simple. He lived in a world that belonged to someone else. hey saw Tam's shabby clothing and the small, weather-beaten bag he carried, and they ordered him aside from the flow of passengers, and checked his packet of passports and visas with extreme care. Then they ordered him to wait. Tam waited, a chilly apprehension rising in his throat. For fifteen minutes he watched them, helplessly. Finally, the Spaceport was empty, and the huge liner from the outer Asteroid Rings was being lifted and rolled by the giant hooks and cranes back into its berth for drydock and repair, her curved, meteor-dented hull gleaming dully in the harsh arc lights. Tam watched the creaking cranes, and shivered in the cold night air, feeling hunger and dread gnawing at his stomach. There was none of the elation left, none of the great, expansive, soothing joy at returning...
In my mind the memory is still painful and raw, like a wound that has refused to heal. I have only to close my eyes to see Pearce leaping toward me, his face a twisted mask of fear and rage. And I can feel the machine-pistol jerking in my hand as a stream of tungsten-steel pellets stopped his maddened rush, washing away all motion and expression in the utter quiescence of death. Yes, I killed George Pearce, whom the world will remember as one of its greatest chemical scientists and one of the three members of the ill-fated first expedition to Venus. I had to kill him. To explain the circumstances which led to it requires that I start at the beginning. Police authorities have ordered me to make this statement as clear and detailed as possible. Everyone recalls the furor created by the privately sponsored launching of the first...
He did not have the qualifications to go into space—so he had them manufactured! It was after oh-one-hundred when Kane arrived at my apartment. I checked the hall screen carefully before letting him in, too, though the hour almost precluded the possibility of any inquisitive passers-by. He didn't say anything at all when he saw me, but his eyes went a bit wide. That was perfectly natural, after all. The illegal plasti-cosmetician had done his work better than well. I wasn't the same person I had been. I led Kane into the living room and stood before him, letting him have a good look at me. "Well," I asked, "will it work?" Kane lit a cigarette thoughtfully, not taking his eyes off me. "Maybe," he said. "Just maybe." I thought about the spaceship standing proud and tall under the stars, ready to go. And I knew that it had to...
It was the Chicago Tribune of June 13th, 189-, which contained this paragraph under the head-line: "Big Broker Missing!" "The friends of Isidor Werner, a young man prominent in Board of Trade circles, are much concerned about him, as he has not been seen for several days. He made his last appearance in the wheat pit as a heavy buyer Tuesday forenoon. That afternoon he left his office at Room 87 Board of Trade, and has not been seen since, nor can his whereabouts be learned. He is six feet two inches high, of athletic build, with black hair and moustache, a regular nose, and an unpronounced Jewish appearance. His age is hardly more than twenty-seven, but he has often made himself felt as a market force on the Board of Trade, where he was well thought of." But it was the Evening Post of the same date which prided...
It all began on a Saturday night at The Space Room . If you've seen any recent Martian travel folders, you know the place: "A picturesque oasis of old Martian charm, situated on the beauteous Grand Canal in the heart of Marsport. Only half a mile from historic Chandler Field, landing site of the first Martian expedition nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A visitor to the hotel, lunch room or cocktail lounge will thrill at the sight of hardy space pioneers mingling side by side with colorful Martian tribesmen. An evening at The Space Room is an amazing, unforgettable experience." Of course, the folders neglect to add that the most amazing aspect is the scent of the Canal's stagnant water—and that the most unforgettable experience is seeing the "root-of-all-evil" evaporate from your pocketbook like snow from the Great Red Desert. We were sitting on the bandstand of the candle-lit...
How much bitter experience a man keeps to himself, let the experienced say, for they only know. For my own part I am conscious that it rarely occurs to me to mention some things which happened either in England or out of it, and that if I do, it is only to pass them over casually as mere facts that had no profound effect upon me. But the importance of any hardship cannot be estimated at once; it has either psychological or physiological sequelæ, or both. The attack of malaria passes, but in long years after it returns anew and devouring the red blood, it breaks down a man's cheerfulness; a night in a miasmic forest may make him for ever a slave in a dismal swamp of pessimism. It is so with starvation, and all things physical. It is so with things mental, with degradations, with desolation; the scars...
Quibblers may shove dictionaries in my face till the end of the universe and I will always maintain that almost anything you can name is a matter of good luck or bad. Every great man owes his success to luck of some sort. What made him great is what he did with his luck after he got it. Had I been born eleven years before Senator Clive Littlebrook, I might have been brilliant to the point of stupidity, as he was. Nobody planned that I should be 24 when he was 35, and a space pilot instead of a senator. He had eleven years to get smarter than me. But all of his brilliance and all of my youthful innocence couldn't have prevented our being spacewrecked on a lonely, uninhabited planet. We knew it was lonely and thought it was uninhabited, as it almost was. It was the second planet...
Dr. Jules Craig, P.L.L., was unhappy. He was famous. He was young. He was talented, healthy, successful. He carried the distinguished degree of P.L.L. He had everything! But he was unhappy. He sat at his tastefully furnished desk, shuffling the Life-Line charts of the patient seated across from him. The patient awaiting the diagnosis was nervous. Poor devil! Craig thought. This man is going to die. He doesn't know it—and I can't tell him. A wave of pity swept through him, intensifying his own brooding unhappiness. Despite the fact he had instructed his psycho-color experts to design his inner consultation office in as soothing a shade as scientifically possible, the patient was sweating profusely, awaiting the verdict. The room was comfortably air-conditioned. The patient was a little fat man. The face was putty-white. Eyes shifty, breathing rapid, voice shaky and twisting of the hat. This man would be dead in...
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...
Illustrated by KOSSIN Everyone supported the Martian program—until it struck home! Johnny Stark , director of the department of Interplanetary Relations for Mars' Settlement One, reread the final paragraph of the note which he had found on his desk, upon returning from lunch earlier in the day. His eye flicked rapidly over the moistly smeared Martian scrawl, ignoring the bitterness directed at him in the first paragraphs. He was vaguely troubled by the last sentences. But he hadn't been able to pin the feeling down. ... Our civilization predates that of Earth's by millions of years. We are an advanced, peaceful race. Yet, since Earth's first rocket landed here thirteen years ago, we have been looked upon as freaks and contemptuously called 'bug-men' behind our backs! This is our planet. We gave of our far-advanced knowledge and science freely, so that Earth would be a better place. We asked nothing...
5:20 P. M., April 17, 1958 Congressman Douglas Blair shivered a little, turned up his coat collar against the gray drizzle that had been falling like a finely-sifted fog all day. His head ached, his nose felt stuffy, and he was tired. It was good of Grayson to pick him up. The front seat of the dark blue sedan was soft and reassuring, and the warm current of air from the heater beneath it felt good. He let his spare, barely six-foot body slump like a bag of wet wash and pushed his hat back with the half-formed thought that it might ease the dull pressure behind his eyes. "Rough going today, eh, Congressman?" Grayson twisted the blue sedan into outbound Washington traffic, turned the windshield wipers to a faster pace. Click-click, click-click, and Blair wished someone would invent windshield wipers for the brain, to be worn like a radio...
Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the door opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again. "Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her. The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfully toward his table desk. "Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office. The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll of her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desk top. "You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than a question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified...
It was late summer-time, and the perfume of flowers stole into the darkened room through the half-opened window. The sunlight forced its way through a chink in the blind, and stretched across the floor in strange zigzag fashion. From without came the pleasant murmur of bees and many lazier insects floating over the gorgeous flower beds, resting for a while on the clematis which had made the piazza a blaze of purple splendour. And inside, in a high-backed chair, there sat a man, his arms folded, his eyes fixed steadily upon vacancy. As he sat then, so had he sat for a whole day and a whole night. The faint sweet chorus of glad living things, which alone broke the deep silence of the house, seemed neither to disturb nor interest him. He sat there like a man turned to stone, his forehead riven by one deep line, his straight...
Three of the hairless bipeds stood in front of the frame building talking. Concealed by the brush beyond the road, Henig studied them carefully. These were the dominant species on this primitive world, unspeakably grotesque things. The pale, white skinned animals had a culture of sorts—their language, their buildings, their wheeled vehicles testified to that—but an animal society was very different from the rational civilization Henig knew. He was naked and he carried no weapons. That was the logic of the computers. But Henig was a Fleet Lieutenant, not one of the scientists. He put his faith in arms rather than computer logic. Stripped of his weapons, he lost a fundamental part of himself. The computers had said he would be safe, but too many things could go wrong. Too many factors might have been left out of the observer data submitted to the machines. Henig inched cautiously toward the...
"You're nuts," came the reply, but the voice on the telephone was jovially reproving rather than sarcastic. "I can't do anything about this order." Peter Manton blinked. "But it has a Four-A-One priority." Brannon nodded—invisibly, of course—and said, "Sure you have a top priority. Anything your lab wants has top. But darn it, Peter, the best priority in the world isn't going to buy you a dozen mousetraps that are nonexistent." "But—" "Besides which, that building you're in is about as rat-proof as a sealed gasoline can. There isn't an item of comestible in the place." "I know that. And the mice can go hungry for all I care. But the mice don't seem to understand that bringing food into the place is not only forbidden by law but dangerous." "But there ain't a mousetrap in the country. Ding bust it, Peter, mousetraps take spring wire, and labor. The people...
Joe Linger raised up on one elbow and stared at the door, frowning. "Who is it?" he called out. A muffled voice answered from beyond the cracked, peeling wood. "Package for Mr. Joseph Linger!" "Just a minute!" Joe laid his magazine aside, rolled to the edge of the bed, and pulled on his trousers. Rising, he poked his feet into frayed slippers and, walking to the door, swung it open. "Sign here, please!" A little, old man stood in the doorway. He held a large square package under one arm and extended the other, holding out a clipboard and pencil to Joe. He had a thatch of white hair and a red, wrinkled face with blue eyes and a scowl. He wore a loose, blue uniform with a cloth badge on his shallow chest, reading: Time Deliveries, Inc. Joe took the clipboard and pencil, scrawled his name and frowned with...
George Main lay dying in the wreckage of the space-ship. Dying—and cursing the deadly wind of Venus. It had killed his mates. It would soon have him. The wind was trying to finish him off right now. It shrieked, moaned, whispered and shouted through the smashed hull where he sprawled in his space-suit. Laughed, too. The wind was a murderer—and was glad. All but he were dead. Soon the grit-laden wind would bury them and their ship. Then all the effort, the skill, the faith—all the ingenuity and labor expended on the expedition—would be wiped away, as invisible as the wind that buried them. Thinking of that, thinking back over each agonizing hour since his landing on Venus, George Main wondered what he should have done, what he could now do, to prevent the utter waste of their efforts and their lives. The wind was his enemy—and the wind couldn't...
Mercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport. Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out. "Here she comes," somebody in the line ahead said. Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling neither glad nor sad. He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes. The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail. High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of bright specks—portholes of the liner Stardust —sank slowly down. There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting, lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home to die. As though on...
About eleven o'clock on the night of Monday, May 12, 1914, Marshall Allerdyke, a bachelor of forty, a man of great mental and physical activity, well known in Bradford as a highly successful manufacturer of dress goods, alighted at the Central Station in that city from an express which had just arrived from Manchester, where he had spent the day on business. He had scarcely set foot on the platform when he was confronted by his chauffeur, a young man in a neat dark-green livery, who took his master's travelling rug in one hand, while with the other he held out an envelope. "The housekeeper said I was to give you that as soon as you got in, sir," he announced. "There's a telegram in it that came at four o'clock this afternoon—she couldn't send it on, because she didn't know exactly where it would find you in Manchester." Allerdyke...
Sometimes a job comes after the man ... and this one came after Gervase like a tiger! The annunciator aroused Gervase from pleasant semi-slumber. He knew the interruption was his own fault for not having turned off the device, but he so seldom had a visitor that he could hardly be blamed for his forgetfulness. Frowning, he pressed the viewer button. A round, red face appeared on the screen. "May I be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Schnee?" it said. "You may, indeed," Gervase replied. "But for what?" "You haven't heard the news? Good, then I'm the first. I imagine I got a head-start on the others because of my superior facilities for locating you. Your address wasn't given; these pronouncements do tend to be a bit vague. Matter of tradition, I suppose." "I haven't heard any news for days," Gervase said, uncomfortably conscious that he was apologizing. "I've...