"This," said chief Van Isaac, "is our new trouble spot." The older man's rodlike finger probed decisively at a violet dot placed on a thin yellow line of a circle, third out from a sun. Other dots peppered the giant glazed star map, companions of which hung on the other three walls of the chamber. "Valaya is the name of the place," Van Isaac continued. "Perhaps you know something about it." "Not much," said the other, a thirtyish, lean man by the name of Arnold Koven. "I mean, not a great deal besides what the telefilms have screamed for the past two weeks. Revolution, slaughter, tribe against tribe." Koven placed a cigarette between his lips, and his eyes smiled with gentle cynicism. "Valaya has a Creole sound." "You'll have no vacation, believe me," Van Isaac responded. "During the colonization, Valaya was peopled largely by residents of the Caribbean. The inhabitants...
A very small slip, at just the wrong place, can devastate any enterprise. One tiny transistor can go wrong ... and ruin a multi-million dollar missile. Which would be one way to stop the missiles.... " We must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster. " Theodore Roosevelt n 1914, it was enemy aliens. In 1930, it was Wobblies. In 1957, it was fellow-travelers. In 1971, it was insane telepaths. And, in 1973: "We don't know what it is," said Andrew J. Burris, Director of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and confused. Kenneth J. Malone tried to appear sympathetic. "What what is?" Burris frowned and drummed his fingers on his big desk. "Malone," he said, "make sense. And don't...
Supreme General Hoshawk, chief of staff, watched with piercing gray eyes while the President of the United States of the Western Hemisphere, Jeffrey Wadsworth, lay relaxed under a cosmic-ray lamp, with no covering but a towel over his loins. The surgeon-general of the Hemispheric Armies raised his hand, and the lamp receded. "Is that enough?" Hoshawk asked dryly. "It's the maximum, even for him," said the surgeon-general. "His reflexes will be faster than light itself." Hoshawk grunted, his eyes narrow. As far as he could see, the speed of a man's reflexes, even of a man who was about to champion seven hundred million persons, wasn't as important as the man's loyalty or his sense of personal responsibility. And Hoshawk did not have much use for Wadsworth. Augusto Iraola of Brazil, deputy president for South America, stepped forward from the group of forty men. He asked the President anxiously, "How...
The man in the white jacket stopped at the door marked "Re-Education Project—Col. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding Officer" and waited while the scanner looked him over. He had been through that door a thousand times, but the scanner made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never seen him before. It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it had never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings to whom it reported might think. It went over him from grey, crew-cut poll to reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry body and lean profile against its stored silhouettes, tasting and smelling him as dubiously as if he were an orange held in storage two days too long. "Name?" it said at last. "Carson, Samuel, 32-454-0698." "Business?" "Medical director, Re-Ed One." While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came rolling down upon him through...
Rafferty was a gambler of the old school. He didn't believe in any of the fancy electronic gadgets that the casinos went in for these days, didn't much care for the psionic games of chance and other tricky and probably rigged affairs. Give him a good poker game any time, and he would be happy. He stood in the door of the Ganymede Casino, outlining himself against the gaudy lights flashing within, standing there patiently. Inside, the rich and would-be rich of a dozen planets were enjoying themselves, playing the brightly-lit games and throwing money around in handfuls. Rafferty waited for some attention. His hand slid to the bulky roll in his pocket—one hundred hundred-credit bills, 10,000 smackers in all. It was all Rafferty had. He was here to triple it, or else. Tomorrow 30,000 had to be handed over to Lee Walsh. It was the result of the one...
BY L. J. STECHER If you could ask them, you might be greatly surprised—some tabus very urgently want to be broken! Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS Although as brash as any other ace newspaper reporter for a high school weekly—and there is no one brasher—Garth was scared. His head crest lifted spasmodically and the rudimentary webbing between his fingers twitched. To answer a dare, Garth was about to attempt something that had never been dared before: a newspaper interview with The Visitor. There had been questions enough asked and answered during the thousands of years The Visitor had sat in his egg-shaped palace on the mountaintop, but no interviews. It was shocking even to think about—something like requesting a gossippy chat with God. Of course, nobody believed the fable any longer that The Visitor would vanish if he was ever asked a personal question—and that he would first destroy the man...
I wanted to call her Soft Breast, because she is soft when I hold her to me. But the Voice told me to call her Diane. When I call her Diane, I have a pleasant feeling, and she seems closer to me. She likes the name "Diane". The Voice knew what was best, of course, as it always does. I must mate with her every day, when the water is brightest. The Voice says so. It also says that I am in a "tank", and that the water is brightest when the "sun" is over the "tank". I do not understand the meaning of "sun", but the Voice says that "noon" is when the "Sun" is over the "tank". I must mate with Diane every "noon". I do know what the "tank" is. It is a very large thing filled with water, and having four "corners", one of which is...
It was only a tiny dot on the view screen when the military lookout on the armed cruiser identified it as an alien spaceship and sounded the general alert. Technicist Ninth Class Narant, chief psychanalyst aboard, studied its approach with a rebellious, almost passionate hope that the impossible was at last going to happen. Or was it impossible? They were the first men to visit this planetary system. Why couldn't they expect to encounter a truly superior race for a change? Intently, Narant examined the course of the alien craft. Rather mischievously he hoped the stranger would suddenly adopt evasion tactics showing it had detected their presence in the black void between the 6th and 7th planets of the Star Restus. That would certainly be a sign of superiority! And what a blow to Central Scientific Headquarters back home. The anti-detection shield was one of their proudest accomplishments. And yet,...
Doug Norris hesitated for an instant. He knew that another movement might well mean disaster. Here deep in the cavernous interior of airless Mercury, catastrophe could strike suddenly. The rocks of the fissure he was following had a temperature of hundreds of degrees. And he could hear the deep rumble of shifting rock, close by. But it was not these dangers of the infernal underworld that made him hesitate. It was that sixth sense of imminent peril that he had felt twice before while exploring the Mercurian depths. Each time, it had ended disastrously. "Just nerves," Norris muttered to himself. "The uranium vein is clearly indicated. I've got to follow it." As he again moved forward and followed that thin, black stratum in the fissure wall, his eyes constantly searched ahead. Then a half-dozen little clouds of glowing gas flowed toward him from a branching fissure. Each was several feet...
The river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with the warm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone and birch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste of smouldering leaves.... It wasn’t the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touched the gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and had vanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry of shore birds. From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of victims borne into this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss. Kimmy shifted...
There are few Americans who went to England before the late wars but will remember Ripon House. The curious student of history—a study, perhaps, too little in vogue with us—could find no better example of the palace of an old feudal lord. Dating almost from the time of the first George—and some even say it was built by the same Wren who designed that St. Paul's Cathedral whose ruins we may still see to the east of London—it frowned upon the miles of private park surrounding it, a marble memorial of feudal monopoly and man's selfish greed. The very land about it, to an extent of almost half a county, was owned by the owners of the castle, and by them rented out upon an annual payment to such farmers as they chose to favor with a chance to earn their bread. In an ancient room of a still older...
After too many years, T. L. Sherred returns with a story that gets our SPACE SPECIAL rating. It's the story of a man with a headache—who found a cure for it! And the cure gave him more power than any man could dream of. So I had a headache. The grandfather of all headaches. You try working on the roof line sometime, with the presses grinding and the overhead cranes wailing and the mechanical arms clacking and grabbing at your inner skull while you snap a shiny sheet of steel like an armored pillowcase and shove it into the maw of a hungry greasy ogre. Noise. Hammering, pounding, shrieking, gobbling, yammering, incessant noise. And I had a headache. This headache had all the signs of permanency. It stayed with me when I slid my timecard into an empty slot that clanged back at me, when I skittered across a...
It was the awfullest dream in the world, no doubt about it. In fact, it seemed to be the only dream there was! He was a morning type, so it was unusual that he should feel depressed in the morning. He tried to account for it, and could not. He was a healthy man, so he ate a healthy breakfast. He was not too depressed for that. And he listened unconsciously to the dark girl with the musical voice. Often she ate at Cahill's in the mornings with her girl friend. Grape juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, apple juice ... why did people look at him suspiciously just because he took four or five sorts of juice for breakfast? "Agnes, it was ghastly. I was built like a sack. A sackful of skunk cabbage, I swear. And I was a green-brown color and had hair like a latrine mop. Agnes,...
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy April 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It was really a pretty fair script, and it caught me at a moment when every playwright worth his salt was playing in France, prostituting in Hollywood or sulking in a slump. I needed a play badly, so I told Ellie to get this unknown up to my office and have a contract ready. When she announced him on the inter-com, my door banged open and a youngster in blue-jeans, sweatshirt and a stubbly crew-cut popped in like a carelessly aimed champagne cork. I said, "I'm sorry, son, but I have an interview right now. Besides we aren't casting yet. Come back in a couple of weeks." His grin never faltered, being of the more durable kind that you...
The first half mile into the swamp hadn't been so bad, but now Mallard began to feel really afraid. There were things in here that no spaceman had ever seen and against some of them the small blaster on his hip would be about as effective as a popgun. A little way ahead of him, he could dimly see the naked body of the Mercurian swamp girl and he swore enviously at the way she slipped through the dense fern growth, her webbed feet gripping the mud firmly. Once she held up her hand warningly and he slipped down behind a fallen tree fern to let a huge plant slug glide past. The thing was nearly forty feet in length and it could move with the speed of an express train. When it was gone, he got up and followed the swamp girl again. He hugged the helmet to him...
Jord awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness. His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day's objectives. He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living. He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes...
He was already a thief, prepared to steal again. He didn't know that he himself was only booty! Phil Garfield was thirty miles south of the little town of Redmon on Route Twelve when he was startled by a series of sharp, clanking noises. They came from under the Packard's hood. The car immediately began to lose speed. Garfield jammed down the accelerator, had a sense of sick helplessness at the complete lack of response from the motor. The Packard rolled on, getting rid of its momentum, and came to a stop. Phil Garfield swore shakily. He checked his watch, switched off the headlights and climbed out into the dark road. A delay of even half an hour here might be disastrous. It was past midnight, and he had another hundred and ten miles to cover to reach the small private airfield where Madge waited for him and the...
On his way home from the concert, Perry Mansfield whistled a pleasant melody from an old Stravinsky classic. But then, troubled by his conscience and that of his psychiatrist, he stopped to study the program again. What was that modern symphony? Oh yes, "The Flivver". The music was supposed to have its roots in antiquity when someone started converting the metal wealth of the earth on an assembly line. Those screeching noises were drill presses and lathes and automatic hammers. The syrupy melody was the saintly salesman who disbursed the wealth of gadget and machine like melted butter across the bread of the land. Perry tried to like it. But he didn't. And that disturbed him. It meant his psychotherapy wasn't working. Dr. Stone would run him through the mechanical analyzer again and scold over the results. His simple act of walking home instead of riding an anti-gravity putterseat labeled...
The audiophone buzzed thrice—one long, followed by two shorts—and Isobar Jones pressed the stud activating its glowing scanner-disc. "Hummm?" he said absent-mindedly. The selenoplate glowed faintly, and the image of the Dome Commander appeared. "Report ready, Jones?" "Almost," acknowledged Isobar gloomily. "It prob'ly ain't right, though. How anybody can be expected to get anything right on this dagnabbed hunk o' green cheese—" "Send it up," interrupted Colonel Eagan, "as soon as you can. Sparks is making Terra contact now. That is all." "That ain't all!" declared Isobar indignantly. "How about my bag—?" It was all , so far as the D.C. was concerned. Isobar was talking to himself. The plate dulled. Isobar said, "Nuts!" and returned to his duties. He jotted neat ditto marks under the word "Clear" which, six months ago, he had placed beneath the column headed: Cond. of Obs. He noted the proper figures under the headings...
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...
The trouble started when the Arcturus Queen was four billion miles out of Earth, heading for the star after which it was named. It pulled clear of the solar system using conventional drive, then switched into subspace. A few minutes later the ship shuddered perceptibly, and an authoritative voice came reassuringly from the public address system. "Passengers will please remain in their seats. We are temporarily cutting the subspace drive due to mechanical difficulties which have developed. There is no cause for alarm." The message was repeated and George said, "What do you suppose is the matter?" "How should I know," Silvia snapped. "I'm not a space mechanic. Why don't you find out if you're so interested." He glared at her. "I was just wondering. You don't have to get so disagreeable. But then, why should now be any different?" She smiled at that, though her blood raced and her...
Lauria Swept down the spiral staircase in regal dignity, and wished there were someone there to witness her entrance. She walked across the parlor to the gun-rack and strapped a holstered pistol to her hip, just above the rustling flare of the full skirt of her evening dress. The green sun's slanting rays in the parlor window told her it was late afternoon, nearly time to get started. She went to the full-length mirror. Beside the mirror hung the framed copy of the Constitution of Pamplin, hand-lettered on parchment. In bold red letters it proclaimed: We, the people of Pamplin, hold that : 1. No government is the best government. 2. A man's home is his castle. 3. A woman's rights are equal to a man's rights. 4. Only the brave deserve the fair. Lauria looked in the mirror, almost fearfully. She saw with approval the breadth of her hips,...
Illustrated by Paul Orban It was a small world, a tiny spinning globe, placed in the universe to weather and age by itself until the end of things. But because its air was good and its earth was fertile, Daniel Loveral had placed a finger upon a map and said, "This is the planet. This is the Dream Planet." That was two years before, back on Earth. And now Loveral with his selected flock had shot through space, to light like chuckling geese upon the planet, to feel the effect of their dreams come true. Loveral was sitting in his office, drumming his long fingers against his desk while the name, Atkinson, ticked through his brain like the sound of a sewing machine. Would he be the only one, Loveral asked himself, or was he just the first? In either case, it was up to Loveral, as leader and guiding...
Duncan Wyatt sprang up, grabbed his gun and started toward the door before he had his eyes properly open. His ears were ringing with the explosive roar that had awakened him and the pre-fab shack still quivered in the shock wave. He thought the Third World War had started. He crouched in the doorway and peered out onto the mesa. The unorthodox shape of the experimental ultra-tight-beam transmitter loomed over him, black against the star-blazing New Mexican sky, bearing a red star of its own to warn low-flying planes. He was all alone here. His partner, Bannister, had flown out to the Coast to oversee the making of new components for a projected improvement in design. Wyatt had never felt lonely before, even in the total solitude of the mesa top with nothing around it but the vast impersonals of sky and desert, sun and wind. Now he did feel...