When Conway Kroll reached his office that morning, there were three prisoners waiting to be interrogated. He smiled coldly at the sight of them, standing in the large bare room awaiting their fate. "Good morning," he said, with steely politeness. "My name is Kroll. It is my job to conduct the interrogation to which you three will be subjected today." One of the three—a tall, youthful-looking man—glared up at him bitterly. "Interrogation? Torture , you mean!" Kroll brought his eyes to rest on the man who had spoken slowly, almost scornfully. "You have the wrong idea completely, my friend. It is necessary to persuade you to divulge certain facts. The State requires it of you. If you refuse—" He gestured sadly—"we must compel you. But you are all so determined to make things hard for us. I don't want to hurt you, you know." "But you will hurt us," said...
Ballard was quite dead. There could be no doubt of it. He lay sprawled in front of Edith, with his head very messily bashed in and with one hand still extended toward her. A long shimmering stream of blood ran half-way across the large room. Dr. Dudley Ballard had been as inconsiderate in his dying as he had been in his living. Art MacKinney and I stood in the doorway and stared. We were shocked not so much by the fact that Ballard was dead as by the fact that he lay in this most secret room, this holy of holies. Ours was the most security conscious project in the whole country; and this was where he had picked to get himself killed. "God! There'll really be a stink about this," MacKinney breathed. "Well, I can't think of anyone who had it coming more than he did," I said. I...
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...
The only friend in space Willard had ever known was dying. Dobbin's lips were parched and his breath came spasmodically. The tips of his fingers that had so many times caressed the control board of the Mary Lou were now black as meteor dust. "We'll never see Earth again," he whispered feebly, plucked weakly at the cover. "Nonsense!" Willard broke in hurriedly, hoping that the dying man would not see through the lie. "We've got the sun's gravity helping us drift back to Earth! We'll be there soon! You'll get well soon and we'll start to work again on a new idea of mine...." His voice trailed helplessly away and the words were lost. It was no use. The sick man did not hear him. Two tears rolled down his cheeks. His face contorted as he tried to withhold a sob. "To see Earth again!" he said weakly. "To walk...
In the future, we may discover new planets; our ships may rocket to new worlds; robots may be smarter than people. But we'll still have slick characters willing and able to turn a fast buck—even though they have to be smarter than Einstein to do it. Anson Drake sat quietly in the Flamebird Room of the Royal Gandyll Hotel, listening to the alien, but soothing strains of the native orchestra and sipping a drink. He knew perfectly well that he had no business displaying himself in public on the planet Thizar; there were influential Thizarians who held no love for a certain Earthman named Anson Drake. It didn't particularly bother Drake; life was danger and danger was life to him, and Anson Drake was known on half a hundred planets as a man who could take care of himself. Even so, he wouldn't have bothered to come if it had...
Illustrated by SCHELLING Above him eighty feet of torpid, black water hung like a shroud of Death, and still he heard his ragged breathing. And something else. Cully concentrated on that sound, and the rhythmic pulsing of his heart. Somehow he had to retain a hold on his sanity ... or his soul. After an hour of careful breathing and exploring of body sensations, Cully realized he could move. He flexed an arm; a mote of gold sand sifted upward in the dark water. It had a pleasant color, in contrast with the ominous shades of the sea. In a few moments, he had struggled to a sitting position, delighting in the curtain of glittering metal grains whirling around him as he moved. And the other sound. A humming in his mind; a distant burble of tiny voices of other minds. Words swirling in giddy patterns he couldn't understand. Shortly...
Nothing was further from my mind, when I discovered the "Release Drug" Relin, than the realization that it would lead me through as strange and ghastly and revealing a series of adventures as any man has ever experienced. I encountered it, in a way, as a mere by-product of my experiments; I am a chemist by profession, and as one of the staff of the Morganstern Foundation have access to some of the best equipped laboratories in America. The startling new invention—I must call it that, though I did not create it deliberately—came to me in the course of my investigations into the obscure depths of the human personality. It has long been my theory that there is in man a psychic entity which can exist for at least brief periods apart from the body, and have perceptions which are not those of the physical senses. In accordance with these...
HUNT THE MAN DOWN! The carrier came first—a flimsy two-passenger craft, unsuited for even the shortest of interplanetary jumps. Swooping down too fast out of the eternal dust-clouds that shrouded the Venusian sky, it crested a hillock by such a narrow margin as to spray sand high into the never-ending wind, then veered right in a crazy arc. Another hillock. The carrier struck it a glancing blow that churned up new clouds of sand and dust as it skated diagonally down the slope beyond. Ahead, jutting from the endless waste of powdery grit that stretched as far as eye could see, loomed low outcroppings of fantastically-eroded rock. The carrier plowed into them with a rending crash. Claw-like crags gouged at the craft's thin metal skin. A hiss of escaping air played sudden gusty counterpoint to the whistle of the wind. Line-welds popped. Seams split. Bucking and shuddering, the carrier jolted...
The ambassador, whose smile had grown fixed, whose thin, broad-domed face was lined and tired, bowed before the screen saying, "Thank you—thank you." On Earth, 26,000,000 miles away, a billion saw his final bow and cheered him. "Luck! Luck! Luck!" they roared. His screen in his suite on the space ship Ceres finally went blank and the voice of the ship's operator cut in nervously, "I'll j-jibe with the Center Room beam in a moment, sir." The operator, a capable man, was frightened. The Ambassador had more reason to be frightened; he took the moment in which he was unlinked from Earth to wipe one hand nervously down across his face. "On C-Center Room, Ambass—" The operator at either end was cut off as the tight official beams met in mid space. A different voice, older and deep bass, said, "Relax, Phil." The Ambassador let his silvery cloak fall from...
Lanya Greggor, holding tightly to her brother Virgil's hand, sauntered with deliberate and exaggerated nonchalance through the great halls of the Martian Museum of Science. Her eyes were wide with excitement and pleasure. She was ten years old and Virgil twelve and this was her first visit to the museum. Hand in hand, always under the watchful eyes of strategically-placed uniformed attendants they walked ecstatically through the innumerable fascinating rooms, stopping to gaze with equally undisguised admiration at mammoth and complex industrial machinery and minute, hypersensitive instruments of obscure function. The attendant smiled warmly as they walked past him and entered the biggest room they had yet been in. "There she is," Virgil said proudly. "Just like I told you." Lanya looked. She was dwarfed by the colossal metal hulk that loomed ponderously before her. She leaned back to scan its immense bulk from top to bottom. The bronze inscription...
So long as there are men and women alive, in a livable environment, then a new beginning is possible. by Charles Dye It was bound to happen sooner or later. Not because man failed to understand his fellow man, but because he failed to understand himself. There wasn't much left afterwards--after the golden showers of deadly dust and the blinding flashes that blotted out the light from the sun. And all because man continued to confuse emotion with reason. But somehow, as before, man survived.... " Don't touch! " Sinzor's command shot through the chill morning air like an arrow. The ragged little group of men stopped dead in their tracks and looked questioningly at their leader. He was pointing down to an object lying half-buried in the soil at his feet. "Another death-thing , maybe," Sinzor said. "Another 'thing our ancestors made with which to destroy themselves." He peered...
When the news came of the discovery of gold at the south pole, nobody suspected that the beginning had been reached of a new era in the world’s history. The newsboys cried “Extra!” as they had done a thousand times for murders, battles, fires, and Wall Street panics, but nobody was excited. In fact, the reports at first seemed so exaggerated and improbable that hardly anybody believed a word of them. Who could have been expected to credit a despatch, forwarded by cable from New Zealand, and signed by an unknown name, which contained such a statement as this: “A seam of gold which can be cut with a knife has been found within ten miles of the south pole.” The discovery of the pole itself had been announced three years before, and several scientific parties were known to be exploring the remarkable continent that surrounds it. But while they...
Sparing people's feelings is deadly. It leads to—no feelings, no people! Scientist William Manning Norcross drank his soup meticulously and scooped up the vegetables at the bottom of the cup, while his attention was focused on the television screen. He watched girls swimming in formation as he gnawed the bone of his steak. He stolidly ate the baked potato with his fingers when the girls turned around, displaying "Weejees Are Best" signs pasted to their shapely backs. The final flourish was more formation swimming, where they formed a wheel under water, swimming past the camera to display in individual letters stuck to their bare midriffs: "Wonderful Weejees!" Norcross chuckled appreciatively when a fat old man swam after them with an "Is That Right?" strung across his behind. Young men followed him, each carrying a one-word card that spelled: "You—Bet—It's—Right—Don't—Be—Left—Buy—Weejees—!" The scene ended on the surface. The grotesque old man was...
It was Orley Mattup's killing of the old lab technician that really made us hate him. Mattup was a guard at the reactor installation at Bayless, Kentucky, where my friend Danny Hern and I were part of the staff when the Outsiders took everything over. In what god-forsaken mountain hole they had found Mattup, and how they got him to sell out to them, I don't know. He was an authentic human, though. You can tell an Outsider. Mattup and Danny and I were playing high-low-jack the night Uncle Pete was killed, sitting on the widewalk where Mattup had a view of the part of the station he was responsible for. High-low-jack is a back-country card game; Danny had learned it in northern Pennsylvania, where he came from, and Mattup loved the game, and they had taught it to me because the game is better three-handed. The evening sessions had...
Twenty-five years later a ship appeared, on an afternoon in the planet's summer. Arak Miller watched it from the mesa. From Earth , he thought. From Earth! But Arak Miller was an ordered man. Even now, in the face of resurging visions of his wife, and his sons, and his work, and the mighty civilization from which he had been cut adrift, his thoughts were ordered: probably the ship had arrived from Earth to resurvey one of the Class II uninhabitable planets of the Alpha Centaurus System. Tomorrow its scout ships would whip along the day sides at five thousand feet. Tomorrow atop the mesa he must light his pyres, some hundred-odd gigantic piles of pine trees and brush that would burn with billowing smoke. He must signal the presence of a lone Earthman. With a hypnotic intensity he stood watching the ship until, toward evening, it merged into the...
Illustrated by Mel Hunter Except for old Dworken, Kotha's bar was deserted when I dropped in shortly after midnight. The ship from Earth was still two days away, and the Martian flagship would get in next morning, with seven hundred passengers for Earth on it. Dworken must have been waiting in Luna City a whole week—at six thousand credits a day. That's as steep to me as it is to you, but money never seemed to worry Dworken. He raised the heavy green lids from his protruding brown eyes as I came in. He waved his tail. "Sit down and join me," he invited, in his guttural voice. "It is not good for a man to drink alone. But I haf no combany in dis by-de-gods-deserted hole. A man must somet'ing be doing, what?" I sat down in the booth across from my Venusian friend, and stared at him while...
There is a small striped smelt called the grunion which has odd egglaying habits. At high tide, on the second, third, and fourth nights after the full of the moon from March to June, thousands of female grunions ride in on the waves to a beach in southern California near San Diego, dig tail-first into the soft sand, deposit their eggs, then ride back on the wash of the next wave. The whole operation lasts about six seconds. On the nights when the grunion are running, hordes of people used to come to the beach with baskets and other containers, and with torches to light the scene, and try to catch the elusive little fish in their hands. They were doing that on an April night in 1960. In the midst of the excitement of the chase, only a few of them noticed that something else was riding the waves...
Death—The soul—The hour of death—Separation of the soul—Sight of the soul in Heaven—The Solar System in the heavens—The Earth as seen from the heavens—The star Capella—Velocity of light—The terrestrial planet seen from afar—The worlds seen from afar—Lumen—Lumen sees again his own life. Journey on a ray of light—Events retraced—Re-ascending the Ages—Psychical optics—Light and sound—Man organised from the planet—The soul and destiny. The sphere of human observation—Time and space—Events in space—Time, space, and eternity. Space and light—The star Gamma in Virgo—The system of Gamma in Virgo—Former existence—The plurality of existences—The unknown—The constellations—The elements—Life on the earth—The process of alimentation—Nutritive atmospheres—Poetry on the Earth—A humanity—The organisation of beings—The development of life—The genealogical tree of life—The men-plants—Souls and atoms—Other senses—Atoms and monads. A world in Orion—Analysis of the nervous system—The Commune—Animated molecules—Various forms of life—Infinite diversity on Sirius—Phosphorescent passions—Lives too long—Infinite diversity—The magnifying power of time—A chrono-telescope—Light. Quærens. You promised, dear Lumen, to...
Professor Weedlemeyer sputtered in his eagerness, making large gestures with his hands. "Of course!" he shouted, his accent becoming thicker with his excitement. "It is lunacy to think only man will increase in his intelligence! Animals will too—ya, und insects! It will be a fierce competition for the earth be—man and the animals!" Jon Egan, science reporter and man of all work for the Carolina Bugle , yawned and searched vainly through littered pockets for a cigarette that wasn't there. He had heard all this before. "Wish you'd do something about my dog Spurious," he muttered. "He is the dumbest—" "Stop annoying me with that fool hound!" Professor Weedlemeyer said crossly. He lifted his voice in a bellow. "Myrtle! Myrtle—where is the beer?" Jon Egan brightened. The swinging door to the kitchen was opened by a foot, and a tray with beer glasses and bottles came through, followed by Myrtle...
My Space-partner was a good reliable sidekick—but his partner was something else! Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion. And the imaginary companion turned out to be me. Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of it, I thought. For instance, Jeff liked to talk a weary lot ... and the imaginary Joe Hansen could spell me listening to him, while I projected a book or just harkened to the wheels going around in my own head against the faint patter of starlight on the hull. I met Jeff first at a space-rodeo, oddly enough, but now the two of us...
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The telephone rang. Reluctantly, Rod Workham picked it up. Nothing good had come from that phone in six years, and his sour expression was almost an automatic reflex. "Workham here," he said. He held the phone an inch away from his ear, but the tirade exceeded his expectations—it would have been audible a foot away: "Workham! How long do you think we're going to stand for this! At the rate you're going, there won't be a man left on Venus or a dollar in the budget! What kind of a personnel director are you? Don't you know this project is vital to every person on Earth? Thirty more resignations came in on this last mail flight." Rod put the receiver gently on...
A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home? They all knew he was a spacer because of the white goggle marks on his sun-scorched face, and so they tolerated him and helped him. They even made allowances for him when he staggered and fell in the aisle of the bus while pursuing the harassed little housewife from seat to seat and cajoling her to sit and talk with him. Having fallen, he decided to sleep in the aisle. Two men helped him to the back of the bus, dumped him on the rear seat, and tucked his gin bottle safely out of sight. After all, he had not seen Earth for nine months, and judging by the crusted matter about his eyelids, he couldn't have seen it too well now,...
The flight into space that made Pilot-Capt. Dan Barstow famous. The flight was listed at GHQ as Project Songbird . It was sponsored by the Space Medicine Labs of the U.S. Air Force. And its pilot was Captain Dan Barstow. A hand-picked man, Dan Barstow, chosen for the AF's most important project of the year because he and his VX-3 had already broken all previous records set by hordes of V-2s, Navy Aerobees and anything else that flew the skyways. Dan Barstow, first man to cross the sea of air and sight open, unlimited space. Pioneer flight to infinity. He grinned and hummed to himself as he settled down for the long jaunt. Too busy to be either thrilled or scared he considered the thirty-seven instruments he'd have to read, the twice that many records to keep, and the miles of camera film to run. He had been hand-picked and...
From somewhere there was a buzzing sound. It kept repeating. The gentle throb of it vibrated his eardrums; the vibrations registered somewhere at the bottom edges of his brain. Buzzzz. Insistently, like a wasp. Like a trapped wasp.... But there were no wasps in the streamlined metal shell of Vanguard-I. Better answer , another part of his brain whispered. Better answer ... they want to tell you what to do.... God! Some sweat oozed from the dark bunches of his eyebrows, fogged the binocular eye-piece of the orbit-synchronized refractor, but he kept watching, he could not stop watching. Buzzz! Buzzzz! Red gouts of flame, as big as a pin-head, as big as a shirt-button, as big as—damn the fogging—up! No, no it was the mushrooms, not the fogging; you could count them, like puffs of gunsmoke along a firing-line stippling the Atlantic seaboard, now branching, riddling westward—others drifting eastward from...