For every weapon there was a defense, but not against the deadliest weapon—man himself! Raging , Trooper Lane hovered three thousand feet above Tammany Square. The cool cybrain surgically implanted in him was working on the problem. But Lane had no more patience. They'd sweat, he thought, hating the chill air-currents that threw his hovering body this way and that. He glared down at the three towers bordering on the Square. He spat, and watched the little white speck fall, fall. Lock me up in barracks. All I wanted was a little time off. Did I fight in Chi for them? Damn right I did. Just a little time off, so I shouldn't blow my top. Now the lid's gone. He was going over all their heads. He'd bowled those city cops over like paper dolls, back at the Armory. The black dog was on Lane's back. Old Mayor himself...
It cannot be said that the Everhard Manuscript is an important historical document.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...
Lieutenant Lloyd spotted the first alien in the ruins of the strange red Martian city on the second day of exploration. His first impulse was to call out to the other men—but then, afraid his voice would startle the creature down at the end of the rubble-strewn street, he silently unholstered his military service pistol and crept forward toward the back (he hoped it was the back) of the alien, his breath rasping behind his faceplate. He was a mere ten paces short of his goal when loose gravel beneath his heavy boot betrayed him. Even in the thin Martian atmosphere, the sound was a sharp one. The creature spun about, one appendage gripping the haft of a slim crystal tube. He froze there, watching Lloyd with odd oval-shaped eyes, yellow-orange in color. Lloyd's thumb slid back the safety catch on his automatic, slowly, carefully. Then the creature lowered the...
" While we remain in our invisible space-ship, the inhabitants of this world cannot see us. Prepare to take notes now in preparation for your final exam on the subject Alien Creatures and Their Actions in Given Situations. Notice below us the female of the dominant Species. She is with her child.... " Clutching Robbie in her arms and holding him tight, Helen Thompson sat down wearily on the ground. The cold and dampness was all around her, boring through the thin cotton dress she wore. Her flesh was cold and her dark brown hair hung in ringlets over her forehead. She wore no shoes. She had lost them miles back, near the ruins at the edge of Chicago. Her feet were blistered and bleeding, numb now from the cold of early morning. Carefully she put her sleeping child on the ground for a moment as she rubbed her feet...
"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...
Clark Street, just north of Chicago's Loop, was the symbol of a million things, all of them bad, Manning thought. Bumpy paving bricks rutted with street car tracks and bordered on both sides by cheap saloons and quarter-a-night flop houses. Hot summer nights when the drunks clustered like flies on the sidewalks and Newberry Park was crowded with cranks trying to save the world and floozies just trying to make a living in it. Old magazine stores where a nickle bought a copy of an old comic magazine and a five spot bought photographs guaranteed to make a high school kid's eyes pop out. Clark Street, where a thousand and one manufacturing gyp artists had office space. He slowed the car and went through the motions of parking. He jockeyed it in towards the curb. There was a scraping sound, and he cut the motor. "You ought to watch it,...
"Let them in, sergeant." The white-haired New United Nations World Space Force chief spoke the words as though he had been forced into the most humiliating surrender in history. And he had been. What could he tell them? They were not fools, after all, and he was so impossibly exhausted.... Uniform was a mess. All day and all night, words, words, ... and nothing. Too many useless, powerless words, all adding up to nothing. Foreign space admirals, ground-force field marshals, defense secretaries from a dozen capitals. Where were the ion-field cannon that had been promised for the last twenty years? Where were the new main-drives? The new alloys? Promises, always promises—but where in God's name were they? And now—now it didn't matter any more. He let his massive frame slump tiredly for a moment, elbows flattening some of the official litter strewn across the broad desk-top, head in his big...
The Security Council was in emergency session. The four delegates would have had easier consciences had more nations been represented, but it was hard to travel now. Only Russia, England and France were able to send their men to New York. Sergei Moskov, USSR, presided unofficially. He wore a harried look, and addressed them wearily. "To think, gentlemen, that it has taken circumstances like these to bring us into accord!" The others said nothing. Overhead, above New York's stone and glass UN building that had been conceived in hope and wrought with faith, they could hear the whine of the patrolling ships. The delegates stared at the table in front of them. "Your country, Mr. Conrad," Moskov said to the American representative, "is the mother of our last hope." He looked around the table for concurrence. Sir Manly straightened a bit, and M. Tourneau's mustache twitched, but they all nodded....
What I'm getting at is that you don't ever have to worry about being bored stiff in Solar Exploitations field work. It never gets dull—and in some pretty strange places, at that. Take the S.E.2100's discovery of Balak, which is a little planet circling 70 Ophiuchi some 20,000 light-years from Earth, for example. You'd never expect to run across the greatest race of surgeons in the Galaxy—structural, neural or what have you—on a little apple like that, any more than you'd expect a four man complement like ours to be handed the sort of life-and-death problem they put to us. And, if by some miracle of prophecy you anticipated both, it's a cinch you'd never expect that problem to be solved in the way ours was. Captain Corelli and Gibbons and I couldn't have gone more than a hundred yards from the S.E.2100 before we met our first Balakian native....
ay day! I scrawled my Larry Maloney across the back of the check and handed it to Nick, the bartender. "Leave me something to operate on," I told him. Nick turned it over. "Still with the News ?" The question was rhetorical. I let it pass without swinging at it. I was mentally estimating the total of the pile of tabs Nick pulled out of the cash register, like a fighter on percentage trying to count the house. I didn't like the figure it gave me. Nick added them up, then added them again before he pulled some bills out of the money drawer and said, "Here's thirty skins. Your rent due?" "This'll cover it. I'll do my drinking here." I went over to a booth and sat down. I lit a cigarette. I smoked. And waited. Presently Sherry, tall, dark and delicious, decided I was making like a...
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...
BY GEORGE O. SMITH ILLUSTRATED BY SMITH Someone behind me in the dark was toting a needle-ray. The impression came through so strong that I could almost read the filed-off serial number of the thing, but the guy himself I couldn't dig at all. I stopped to look back but the only sign of life I could see was the fast flick of taxicab lights as they crossed an intersection about a half mile back. I stepped into a doorway so that I could think and stay out of the line of fire at the same time. The impression of the needle-ray did not get any stronger, and that tipped me off. The bird was following me. He was no peace-loving citizen because honest men do not cart weapons with the serial numbers filed off. Therefore the character tailing me was a hot papa with a burner charge labelled "Steve...
eat! Heat of a white-hot sun only two hours old. Heat of blazing sands where shimmering, gassy waves made the sparse sagebrush seem about to burst into flames. Heat of a wind that might have come out of the fire-box of a Mogul on an upgrade pull. A highway twisted among black masses of outcropping lava rock or tightened into a straightaway for miles across the desert that swept up to the mountain's base. The asphalt surface of the pavement was almost liquid; it clung stickily to the tires of a big car, letting go with a continuous, ripping sound. Behind the wheel of the weatherbeaten, sunburned car, Dean Rawson squinted his eyes against the glare. His lean, tanned face was almost as brown as his hair. The sun had done its work there; it had set crinkly lines about the man's eyes of darker brown. But the deeper lines...
Hurry! Hurry! Run as fast as you can go to the big tree! Crouch beneath its branches and hide, staring up through its open spaces to see if anything is glinting in the clear sky. Anything there? Oh God, yes! No, it's only a bird, a small cloud drifting. Now! Dash madly, crawl on your belly, fight on to the next place of concealment! Winston Eberly knew he was talking to himself, but he didn't give a damn. He was sweating and sick from exertion, half mad with burning thirst and bleeding from an unknown number of cuts and scratches, but that didn't matter either. The only thing that had any real meaning or value was the stuff in the box in his pocket. He slapped the pocket with a dirt-encrusted hand. "Good old box! Good old U-235!" he mumbled feverishly. "You'll pull us out of this mess we're in....
Tommy Driscoll lay on his stomach in the grass outside his father's laboratory and read his comic books. He was ten years old and wholly innocent of any idea that Fate or Chance or Destiny might make use of him to make the comic books come true. He was clad in grubby shorts, with sandals, and no socks or blouse. Ants crawled on his legs as he lay on the ground, and he absently scratched them off. To the adult eye he was merely the son of that Professor Driscoll who taught advanced physics at Harwell College, and in summer vacation puttered around with research. As such, Tommy was inconsiderable from any standpoint except that of Fate or Chance or Destiny. They had use for him. He was, however, wholly and triumphantly a normal small boy. As he scratched thoughtfully and absorbed the pictures in his comic book, he was...
"Happy New Year!" she cried. But how often should one hear it said in a single lifetime? Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS Outside , bells were ringing. "Happy New Year!" The mad sound of people crazed for the moment, shouting, echoed the bells. "Happy New Year!" A sound of music, waxing, waning, now joined in wild symphony by the voices, now left alone to counterpoint the noise of human celebration.... For a while, Oliver Symmes heard the raucous music of the crowd. It became a part of him, seemed to come from somewhere inside him, gave him life. And then, as always, it passed on, leaving him empty. Shadows.... The door to his room opened and a young-looking woman, dressed in a pleasant green uniform, came in and turned up the light. On her sleeve she wore the badge of geriatrician, with the motto, "To Care for the Aged." "Happy New...
Would this be the last poker game—with all life at stake and every card a mere deuce? MacPherson shuffled the cards over and over again. His hands were almost steady. "Want to place a limit on the bets?" he asked. His two colleagues who had made the night drive with him from the University said nothing, but Rothman laughed. "Today?" he said. "Today, the sky's the limit." MacPherson rested the deck on the table and watched as Rothman stood up to look through the barred window at the glittering Arizona desert. Rothman had got thinner during his months of confinement; his shoulders were bony beneath the gray hospital robe and his balding head looked like a skull. "Are you going to play?" asked MacPherson. "Or is poker too childish an amusement for a mathematician?" Rothman turned his back to the window. "Oh, I'll play. When three old friends from the...
Illustrated by BURCHARD Why were they apologetic? It wasn't their fault that they came to Earth much too late. The beings stood around my bed in air suits like ski suits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks. I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They are people. I recognize people and whether I am going to like this person or that person by something in the way they move and how they get excited when they talk; and I know that I like these people in a motherly sort of way. You have to feel motherly toward them, I guess. They all remind me of Ronny, a medical student I knew once. He was small and...
To live different and exciting lives, all I had to do was sign here—and give up my own life! Looking out the window, I saw them crossing the court toward the building—two of them. One, the taller with yellow hair, was carrying a flat, expensive briefcase, and the other, of course, was carrying the large square box that contained the Sim. The buzzer sounded, announcing them at the door, and I opened it with mixed feelings. I wasn't sure myself how I would act and—well, you hear so many stories about EL, and this was really my first contact with them. They were standing out in front, looking just like a couple of door-to-door salesmen. And that's just what they were, even if they were called Electro Medical Consultants. Just a fancy name for salesmen. They were very neat in appearance, just as good salesmen should be. Their hats looked...
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction May 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] That's what we always called them, where I come from, huddlers. Damnedest thing to see from any distance, the way they huddle. They had one place, encrusting the shore line for miles on one of the land bodies they called the Eastern Seaboard. A coagulation in this crust contained eight million of the creatures, eight million . They called it New York, and it was bigger than most of the others, but typical. It wasn't bad enough living side by side; the things built mounds and lived one above the other. Apartments they called them. What monstrosities they were. We couldn't figure this huddling, at first. All our attention since Akers' first penetration into space had been directed another way...
The old courthouse was in the unreconstructed part of town. No buses ran out here, and the only way that Stan and Julie could reach the court was on foot, threading their way through the debris of neglect and vandalism that littered the narrow streets. This was a part of New York that Julie had never seen. Twentieth century tenements, dimly illuminated by ancient incandescent lamps, lined the rubble-filled streets, where garbage and the decaying carcasses of poisoned rats lay stinking in the gutters. The night was warm, but Julie shivered. She hurried along at Stan's side, trying to hold her breath to shut out the unpleasant smells. They stopped at the edge of the sidewalk across the street from the court and watched a crowd of people milling about the entrance, anxiously pressing to the box office to try to get hard-to-get tickets. "Look at that mob!" Julie said....
Illustrated by Paul Orban Joseph Heidel looked slowly around the dinner table at the five men, hiding his examination by a thin screen of smoke from his cigar. He was a large man with thick blond-gray hair cut close to his head. In three more months he would be fifty-two, but his face and body had the vital look of a man fifteen years younger. He was the President of the Superior Council, and he had been in that post—the highest post on the occupied planet of Mars—four of the six years he had lived here. As his eyes flicked from one face to another his fingers unconsciously tapped the table, making a sound like a miniature drum roll. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five top officials, selected, tested, screened on Earth to form the nucleus of governmental rule on Mars. Heidel's bright narrow eyes flicked, his fingers drummed. Which...
The purr and throb of London was quivering in stuffily through the open windows. The squeals of the “special” newsboys and the hansom-whistles of the early diners-out splashed across the blur and din, standing out against the immeasurable roar as against a silence. The heat of a London summer lay heavily over us; the undying rattle of wheels beat up to us wearily, the mid-season blare and hurry of town echoing irritatingly in their jingle and clatter as they streamed ceaselessly by. The stew and hubbub of the afternoon enclosed us as with a pall of depression. By us I mean Gerry and myself. Flung back listlessly was I in my club chair, and watching him as he strolled monotonously up and down before the great bow-window that gave upon Pall Mall. His hands were scabbarded hilt high in his pockets. His brows and the corners of his eyes were...
Commander Benedict kept his eyes on the rear plate as he activated the intercom. "All right, cut the power. We ought to be safe enough here." As he released the intercom, Dr. Leicher, of the astronomical staff, stepped up to his side. "Perfectly safe," he nodded, "although even at this distance a star going nova ought to be quite a display." Benedict didn't shift his gaze from the plate. "Do you have your instruments set up?" "Not quite. But we have plenty of time. The light won't reach us for several hours yet. Remember, we were outracing it at ten lights." The commander finally turned, slowly letting his breath out in a soft sigh. "Dr. Leicher, I would say that this is just about the foulest coincidence that could happen to the first interstellar vessel ever to leave the Solar System." Leicher shrugged. "In one way of thinking, yes. It...