One man's retreat is another's prison ... and it takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home! Forty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing fear—a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura. Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning.... It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos, were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after spawning its first-born. For it was June...
Old Cobber's hand trembled slightly as he turned his tankbox so that his guns would point at the crew working outside. Wilson, atop the white hill, watching the men clear away the ammonia snow drifts from the jets of the rocket, was the first to notice the challenging position of Cobber in his tankbox. "Are you getting in or out of the airlock?" he radioed to Cobber. "Make up your mind." The old man's lips were dry and his voice was hoarse as he spoke into the mouthpiece. "I am going to blow up the ship," he said. Instantly the work of clearing the field stopped. Through the haze of poison air that surrounded the planet, Cobber could see them wheel into a semi-circle not more than thirty yards away from him and the airlock that he held. Wilson's tank rumbled a few feet forward from the semi-circle. "You don't...
The three men bent over the chart and once again computed the orbit. It was quiet in the satellite, a busy quiet broken by the click of seeking microswitches and the gentle purr of smooth-running motors. The deep pulsing throb of the air conditioner had stopped: the satellite was in the Earth's shadow and there was no need for cooling the interior. "Well," said Morgan, "it checks. We'll pass within fifty feet of the other satellite. Too close. Think we ought to move?" Kaufman looked at him and did not speak. McNary glanced up and snorted. Morgan nodded. He said, "That's right. If there's any moving to be done, let them do it." He felt a curious nascent emotion, a blend of anger and exhilaration—very faint now, just strong enough to be recognizable. The pencil snapped in his fingers, and he stared at it, and smiled. Kaufman said, "Any way...
“As for my particular, I am verily perswaded, that since that age (thirtie yeares), both my spirit and my body have more decreased than encreased, more recoyled than advanced. It may be that knowledge and experience shall encrease in them, together with life, that bestow their time well: but vivacitie, promptitude, constancie, and other parts much more our owne, more important, and more essentiall, they droope, they languish, and they faint.”— Montaigne ( Florio’s translation ). The ending of the nineteenth century, like that of the eighteenth, was a time of terrible and strange things, as if it were coming to be the law of human affairs that the sunsets of the centuries should be red with a “Terror” and dark with despair. In England—then, as in the past, the refuge of banished men—social disorder reached a height that would soon have driven all her quiet dwellers to seek more...
ILLUSTRATOR SUMMERS Renner had a purpose in life. And the Purpose in Life had Renner. The star ship came out of space drive for the last time, and made its final landing on a scrubby little planet that circled a small and lonely sun. It came to ground gently, with the cushion of a retarder field, on the side of the world where it was night. In the room that would have been known as the bridge on ships of other days, instrument lights glowed softly on Captain Renner's cropped white hair, and upon the planes of his lean, strong face. Competent fingers touched controls here and there, seeking a response that he knew would not come. He had known this for long enough so that there was no longer any emotional impact in it for him. He shut off the control panel, and stood up. "Well, gentlemen," he said,...
Stark disaster to a brave lad in space may—to the mind that loves—be a tragedy pridefully concealed. The mail ship , MR4, spun crazily through space a million miles off her trajectory. Her black-painted hull resembled a long thermonuclear weapon, and below her and only a scant twenty million miles away burned the hungry, flaming maw of the Sun. The atomic-powered refrigeration units of the MR4 were working full blast—and still her internal and external temperatures were slowly and inexorably rising. Her atomic engines had been long since silenced—beaten by the inexhaustible, fiery strength of the invincible opponent waiting patiently a narrowing twenty million miles "below." Hal Burnett twisted painfully on the narrow space-bunk, his tormented body thrusting desperately against the restraining bands of the safety straps that lashed him in against the dangers of non-gravity. He moaned, and twisted sideways, while his half-asleep mind struggled on an almost instinctive...
It didn't matter that he had quit. He was still one of the guilty. He had seen it in her eyes and in the eyes of others. John Rush smoothed the covers over his wife, tucking them in where her restless moving had pulled them away from the mattress. The twins moved beside him, their smooth hands following his in the task, their blind eyes intent on nothingness. "Thank you," he said softly to them, knowing they could not hear him. But it made him feel better to talk. His wife, Mary, was quiet. Her breathing was smooth, easy—almost as if she were sleeping. The long sleep. He touched her forehead, but it was cool. The doctor had said it was a miracle she had lived this long. He stood away from the bed for a moment watching before he went on out to the porch. The twins moved back...
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...
He didn’t expect to be last—but neither did he anticipate the horror of being the first! NEARLY TWO hundred years of habit carried the chairman of Exodus Corporation through the morning ritual of crossing the executive floor. Giles made the expected comments, smiled the proper smiles and greeted his staff by the right names, but it was purely automatic. Somehow, thinking had grown difficult in the mornings recently. Inside his private office, he dropped all pretense and slumped into the padding of his chair, gasping for breath and feeling his heart hammering in his chest. He’d been a fool to come to work, he realized. But with the Procyon shuttle arriving yesterday, there was no telling what might turn up. Besides, that fool of a medicist had sworn the shot would cure any allergy or asthma. Giles heard his secretary come in, but it wasn’t until the smell of the...
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...
Doctors had given him just one month to live. A month to wonder, what comes afterward? There was one way to find out—ask a dead man! The amber brown of the liquor disguised the poison it held, and I watched with a smile on my lips as he drank it. There was no pity in my heart for him. He was a jackal in the jungle of life, and I ... I was one of the carnivores. It is the lot of the jackals of life to be devoured by the carnivore. Suddenly the contented look on his face froze into a startled stillness. I knew he was feeling the first savage twinge of the agony that was to come. He turned his head and looked at me, and I saw suddenly that he knew what I had done. "You murderer!" he cursed me, and then his body arched in...
It was three in the afternoon and quitting time at Utopian Appliances, Inc. Bertram J. Bernard, the firm's stocky, thick-jawed president, waited discreetly at his desk for a few minutes, then closed the file he had been studying, bid his secretary a pleasant evening, and strode calmly out of the office. He did not want to appear eager, and succeeded superbly in that. Joining several junior executives, he conversed genially with them as they descended to the rapid-transit floor. Three of the bright, confident young men decided to stop for a quick one at the building's plush saloon. Well, that was okay—Bernard had been a late-runner in his youth. But now, well into middle age, he had learned that life had other demands and pleasures. "Have a good run, B. B.," said Watkins, the treasurer, at the rap-tran gate. "Gloria's coming in on the three-thirty and we're going to dinner...
At first they thought the attack was a joke. And then they realized the truth! At first the two scientists thought the Indian attack on them was a joke perpetrated by some of their friends. After all, modern Indians did not attack white men any more. Except that these did. George Arthbut and Sidney Hunt were both out of New York, on the staff of the Natural History Museum. George was an ethnologist who specialized in what could be reconstructed about the prehistoric Indians of North America, with emphasis on those of the Southwest. He was a tall, lean, gracious bald man in his early sixties. Sidney was an archeologist who was fascinated by the ruins of the same kind of ancient Indians. Medium-sized, with black hair that belied his sixty-five years, he and George made an excellent team, being the leaders in their field. They had come west on...
Frane Lewis enjoyed another sadistic shiver as he moved up the narrow passageway to the captain's control room. To his flared nostrils the warm, moist air of the small space-freighter was still heavy with the smell of death. A psychiatrist could have told him that this was a neural confusion of olfactory sensation with the perverted emotional excitement of murder. But no physicians ever attended Frane's murders, except at inquests. Three crewmen, still warm, lay at their posts with bloody splotches staining their tunic pockets. Two more chores aboard and his pay, fabulous pay, was earned. For Frane simple plans worked best. He rapped on the gray magnesium panel. "Your lunch, sir," he called. Inside, a solenoid thumped. The port slid aside revealing the captain's square back outlined against the white-sprinkled velvet of space. As the executive turned away from the transparent nose dome Frane's weapon spoke its final invitation...
The Conquistadors were tall men, tall and bronzed by many suns, and splendid as they strode down the gangplank in a seemingly endless procession. They were fair-haired, with flashing black eyes like polished onyx, and their straight profiles might have been copied from the faces of the silver coins that jingled in their pockets. In the steamy-hot atmosphere of the new-found planet, S'zetnu, they stripped to the waist almost at once, and their muscles rippled in the blue-green sunlight.... At the edge of the pallid forest surrounding the clear spot where the great rocket had landed, many eyes were watching their advent. Wondering eyes, wistful and excited eyes ... but eyes that peered and squinted, rheumy with disease and almost blind. The Conquistadors, after the manner of their ancient ancestors, knelt down in a ring, hands folded, heads bowed. One of them—the tallest, the most splendid—stood in the center of...
"No," said the old man. "But you don't realize what it means," said Jorun. "You don't know what you're saying." The old man, Kormt of Huerdar, Gerlaug's son, and Speaker for Solis Township, shook his head till the long, grizzled locks swirled around his wide shoulders. "I have thought it through," he said. His voice was deep and slow and implacable. "You gave me five years to think about it. And my answer is no." Jorun felt a weariness rise within him. It had been like this for days now, weeks, and it was like trying to knock down a mountain. You beat on its rocky flanks till your hands were bloody, and still the mountain stood there, sunlight on its high snow-fields and in the forests that rustled up its slopes, and it did not really notice you. You were a brief thin buzz between two long nights, but...
Jack's blunder was disastrous, but what he worried about was: would Einstein have approved? Dear Mr. Gretch: Mrs. Burroughs and I are sending your son Jack to you because we do not know what else to do with him. As you can see, we can't keep him with us in his present condition. Also, Jack owes us two weeks rent and, since Mrs. Burroughs and I are retired, we would appreciate your sending the money. It has been a dry year and our garden has done poorly. The only reason we put up with your son in the first place was because we are so hard-pressed. He saw the sign on the porch, rang the bell and paid Mrs. Burroughs a month's rent without even looking at the room. Then he ran out to his car and commenced pulling out suitcases and boxes and dragging them upstairs. After the third...
The sun was dying. About its sullen shadow-streaked red globe thousands of miniature artificial worlds clustered like a swarm of night-chilled midges. So thickly did they hug the great globe of dulling flame that it seemed Sol had acquired an outer husk of interlocked asteroids and moonlets. Of all the planets and their satellites only Earth remained—a shrunken and changed planet. And Earth too had shifted its orbit until it now swung but a few million miles from its molten primary. In the huge ovoid of metal that was the Time Bubble the three men making up its crew had by now grown accustomed to the changes that three million years had brought to the solar system. They had expected great changes—and found them. This was to be their first stop in their time quest for an efficient shield against the deadly radiations of atomic disintegration's side effects. Devin Orth,...
The day was still no more than a ragged streak of red in the east; the pre-dawn air was sharply cold, making Johnny Youngbear's face feel slightly brittle as he dressed quietly in the gray bedroom. He sat down on the bed, pulling on his boots, and felt his wife stir sleepily beneath the covers. Suddenly she stiffened, sat upright in the bed, startled into wakefulness. Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawk-like face unreadable in the cold gray light streaming through the huge picture window. "Johnny?" said his wife hesitantly. He murmured an acknowledgement, watching the bright flare of color as she drew on the cigarette. Her soft, dark hair was coiled loosely around her shoulders, very black against the pale skin....
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...
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...
A few long bones in the fallen leaves with the shadows of the tree dancing, a glint of gold where the jawbone sat beneath the nameless tree— "Look at the char marks on that rib!" the young man exclaimed. "So they had heat guns back then." "That wasn't so long ago." The old man peered up at Paul's face. "They stole 'em from a government arsenal. That's how they was able to massacre so many colonies. That wasn't so long ago. I watched that man drive his uniharvester out of the ship. I even remember that gold tooth shining in his mouth." "But this is an Earth tree, a peach maybe; they planted it; look how tremendous it's grown." He liked to tease the old man. "It took a long, long time." It seemed to be the only Earth-life that remained. But a mouse rustled through the leaves and confounded...
Kuru paused, his stone knife poised above the half-skinned kill. He listened, at the same time twitching his sensitive nostrils in an effort to read the messages of the wind. But there was nothing in the air for his nose to read. Rather, it was sound that gave him warning. He stood up and looked through the trees at the small valley beyond the ridge on which he stood. He could hear the raucous cry of birds and the tree people. Kuru wanted very much to run to his people, but if he should do so what would he tell them? That he was running from that which he had not even looked upon with his own eyes? That Kuru ran from the cry of birds and tree people? Now the tree people saw him and they paused in their flight, concentrating their numbers in the trees over his head,...
The skipper looked at what Ernest Hotaling had scribbled on the slip of paper. The skipper read it and exploded. "What kind of nonsense is this?" "Of course it wouldn't rhyme in a literal translation," Ernest said mildly. "But that's the sense of it." "Doggerel!" the skipper exclaimed. "Is this the message of the ages? Is this the secret of the lost civilization?" "There are others, too," Ernest said. He was the psychologist-linguist of the crew. "You've got to expect them to be obscure at first. They didn't purposely leave any message for us." Ernest sorted through his scraps of paper and picked one out: "There seems to be something there," Ernest said. The skipper snorted. "No, really," Ernest insisted. "An air of pessimism—even doom—runs all through this stuff. Take this one, for instance: "Now that begins to make some sense," said Rosco, the communications chief. "It ties in with...