All she wanted was a mate and she had the gumption to go out and hunt one down. But that meant poaching in a strictly forbidden territory! The best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was also looking for a husband. This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted of every worldly pleasure and who...
N'Zik was a forlorn and weary figure at the forward port. He balanced his frail, bulbous body on four of his eight limbs, while the other four moved listlessly over the etheroscope, adjusting sights and lenses. N'Zik wondered dully why he bothered. Even from here he could see that the system looking ahead, the dull reddish Sun with its wild and darksome planets, was not for them. Bitterness flooded his soul. To have come so far and searched so long, only to find this! In all this Galaxy here was the one Sun that sustained a planetary system, and that Sun was dying! The irony was more than he could bear. Shi-Zik came to stand beside him. Only she and N'Zik were left, of all the thousands; two alone on this driving colossus which was the only world they had ever known. She sensed his bitterness now and tried to...
They made their camp high on the breast of the gently swelling hill. As the small planet turned toward the sunset, MacMartree stood a moment on the hillside, watching. Far out on the grass-covered plain their ship stood gleaming, a slender candle, touched by the flame of the sinking sun. Then, quickly, the far horizon caught the sun and pulled it under, and the gloom of night rushed in to drown the pale twilight. "Night comes so fast here," Abner said, at MacMartree's side. "Yes," MacMartree agreed, turning to him. "And day comes even faster. Time for sleep now, with morning only four hours away." "I can't get used to it," Abner said as they moved back into the camp area. "Sleeping and waking in four hour bits!" MacMartree laughed at that. "Abner, you're getting old. You can't adapt anymore." Abner laughed, too, and unrolled his sleep-kit for the night....
I was climbing the steep side of a central Wisconsin hill, holding my bow away from my body for balance, when I first saw the stranger. He sat on a stump at the crest and watched me struggle up. As I drew nearer I panted out a greeting and received his cheerful "Hi" in return. When I finally reached the top, I threw myself on the ground and began catching my breath. He didn't say anything at first, just looked at the bow and the quiver of arrows on my back. Finally he said, "May I look at it?" and reached for the bow. I handed it to him. He examined it carefully and returned it. "Beautiful workmanship. Is that all you use?" he asked. "I never cared much for guns," I answered. "I've always thought a bow gave the animal more of an even chance for his life." We talked...
Markten flew low over the sun-lit ruins, and wondered idly if he would find any more in them than he had found elsewhere on the planet. "Looks as completely dead as all the rest," he said to his companion. "New City has a big enough population anyhow, as far as I'm concerned. Not that it's important, I suppose. There's always plenty of space in which to expand, but you know what I mean." The younger occupant of the low-circling aircraft nodded his understanding. "There'd be enough room on either side of the Big Mountains to take care of millions more of us, I guess. But I think you're right. Anyway, there isn't another nomad or ruin-dweller on the planet. New City is as complete as it's going to be—and as you say, twelve million is enough. But do you think we'll find any more plans down there?" "Hard to say,"...
If this was true, there ought to be another edition of What Every Young Girl Should Know! hat," she demanded, sitting bolt upright in the hospital bed, "has happened to the medical world? In Italy, they tell me I have an abdominal tumor. In Paris, it's cancer. And now you fat-heads are trying to tell me I'm pregnant!" I stuffed my stethoscope into my jacket pocket and tried to pat her hand. "Take it easy, Mrs. Caffey—" "It's Miss Caffey , damn you," she said snatching her hand away, "and better I should have gone to an astrologer!" "See here, now," I said, letting a stern note enter my voice. "You came here requesting a verification of the malignancy of this growth. Our discovery of a six month foetus is a fact, not an accusation." "Look, Buster, I'm a thirty-six-year-old spinster. Like the joke goes, I haven't been married or...
As the frilly-bloused rockette bent over him to unbuckle his safticorsette, newly appointed Commissioner-For-Economics-For-Mars J. Edwin Elbert peeked. But her fingernails tatted so hastily at the buckle that he raised his surprisingly youthful blue eyes to her face. She was blushing there too. A pretty little baby face. Skillfully he swallowed a rising belch that was a natural consequence of the cessation of gravity upon a paunch overbloated with farewell champagne, Venus-dipped cold crab and too sweet apricot bread. "Director Hugens is to be congratulated upon his choice of rockettes," he rumbled, sneaking his fat, glossily manicured fingers about her wrist. The click of the powder-room door would warn him of his wife's return. "Just the other day I was telling him that the new Bolo II should have only the best. I see he has exceeded even my most hopeful expectations." She giggled nervously. "Tell me my dear, when...
Professor Hiram Dexter put the finishing touches on his toilet by tenderly brushing out his crisp, black Vandyke beard. He stepped back to look at himself in the mirror. He had to stoop a little for even the full-length glass was short for his six feet four inches of gangling height. Nevertheless he regarded his image with undiluted satisfaction. "Ah, Dexter," he sighed, "you're a dashing rascal." Humming tunelessly, for he was quite tone-deaf, he picked up a book titled, "The Nutritive Quotient, Vitamin Factors And Trace Elements of Protein-High Diets," put his hat on, the light out, and left the house. Outside, a spring night hovered tenderly over the campus of Fredonia College. The darkness was alive with the richness of new grass, the vagrant perfumes of verbena, alyssum, calendula, nemophila and ageratum, not to mention lobelia, mignonette, nicotiana, scabiosa, Kochia and salpiglossis. He knew them all and loved...
Was this ill-fated expedition the end of a proud, old race—or the beginning of a new one? There are strange gaps in our records of the past. We find traces of man-like things—but, suddenly, man appears, far too much developed to be the "next step" in a well-linked chain of evolutionary evidence. Perhaps something like the events of this story furnishes the answer to the riddle. Aboard the ship, there was neither day nor night; the hours slipped gently by, as vistas of star-gemmed blackness slid across the visiscreens. For the crew, time had some meaning—one watch on duty and two off. But for the thousand-odd colonists, the men and women who were to be the spearhead of migration to a new and friendlier planet, it had none. They slept, and played, worked at such tasks as they could invent, and slept again, while the huge ship followed her plotted...
It was a tremendous house. And they were newlyweds. And were still a mite flighty. And for a while that accounted for the whole thing. At the moment, it seemed to Ernie Lane that in a house which even the real estate agent said had "either" eleven or twelve rooms, it was quite conceivable that he and Melinee had overlooked that extra room. After all, they had only been living at 1312 Cedar Lane for four days and had hardly had time to make a complete survey of the place. Now it was quite different. For Ernie Lane had stopped walking hurriedly past that extra door, had stopped giving it only casual curiosity, had even stopped wondering afterward. This night he had come home a bit tired, gone directly to greet his loving wife, and then decided to put a stop to the gnawing question. While Melinee fried the chicken,...
I bought the typewriter in a pawn shop on Third Avenue. The pawn shop proprietor was a balding old man with a walrus mustache. " How much?" I asked him. "Five dollars," he said casually. I glanced at him skeptically. The machine was a Remington Noiseless, with italics, probably worth a little over a hundred new, and it couldn't have been more than a year or two old. " How much?" I asked. "Five dollars, is what I said. Five." He held up the fingers of his widespread hand. "Five. One-two-three...." "What's wrong with it?" I asked suspiciously. The old man shrugged. "Something has to be wrong with it? Listen, young man, don't look a gift horse in the mouth." "How come it's so cheap?" The old man sighed deeply. "You try to do a favor, you get all kinds of questions. Would you feel happier if I charged you...
Captain Brandon was a pioneer. He explored the far reaches of space and reported back on how things were out there. So it was pretty disquieting to find out that the “far reaches of space” knew more about what went on at home than he did. [p 21 ] He looked at it as a man looks at a flickering fireplace and thinks of other things. He thought of the sun, 52 trillion miles away, a pinpoint of light lost in the dazzle of the Milky Way—the Earth a speck of dust in orbit just as this planet was to its master, Sirius. Nine light years away. Of course, thirteen years had passed on Earth since they had left, because the trip took four years by RT—relative time. But even four years is a long time to be shut up in Astro One with five other men, especially when one...
There is a quiet horror to this story from Tomorrow.... Evening had begun to fall. In the cities the clamor softened along the streets, and the women made small, comfortable, rattling noises in the kitchens. Out in the country the cicadas started their singing, and the cool smell began to rise out of the earth. But everywhere, in the cities and in the country, the children were late from school. There were a few calls, but the robotic telephone devices at the schools gave back the standard answer: "The schools are closed for the day. If you will leave a message it will be recorded for tomorrow." The telephones between houses began to ring. "Is Johnny home from school yet?" "No. Is Jane?" "Not yet. I wonder what can be keeping them?" "Something new, I guess. Oh, well, the roboteachers know best. They will be home soon." "Yes, of course....
He knew that there had been trouble, and he had been told what he had to do. The trouble was he had forgotten. He didn't remember where it was. He had been speeding past an off-color white dwarf when it happened. If he had taken the trouble to look around, he would have seen that the white star was going to explode. He knew a potential nova when he took a good look at one. But after all these centuries he had grown careless, and when the blast had come—the small star suddenly blazing into a billion-fold brilliance—the penetrating radiation had hit him with full intensity. There had been no ship to protect him, no clothing that might serve as a shield. His kind had done away with such things eons before, as they had learned to move through space by using some of the radiant energy that filled it....
GOD, God! how Thy past clings to us like shadows, turn we as we may forever to the sunrise! Out of the night and from beyond it come forms that seem buried below the reach of grave-desecrating memory; they plead with us and claim us as their kin, and all the nobleness we have laboured after succumbs to the witchery of their piteous appeals. It was indeed pathetic to see his face as he struggled with a past that had been dead for a generation. He thrust it from him and it would return. He reached out for dim features of it he had loved, and they eluded him. At last came out of the wreckage of dreams the solidarity of life and law. How tyrannous the bond of nature is! What love my mother bore me, and how the memory of it wells over the desert of my youth!...
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...
Steadily they smashed the mensurate battlements, in blackness beyond night and darkness without stars. Yet Mr. Wordsley, the engineer, who was slight, balding and ingenious, was able to watch the firmament from his engine room as it drifted from bow to beam to rocket's end. This was by virtue of banked rows of photon collectors which he had invented and installed in the nose of the ship. And Mr. Wordsley, at three minutes of the hour of seventeen over four, tuned in a white, new star of eye-blinking magnitude and surpassing brilliance. Discovering new stars was a kind of perpetual game with Mr. Wordsley. Perhaps more than a game. "I wish I may, I wish I might ..." Mr. Wordsley said. The fiddly hatch clanged. DeCastros, that gross, terrifying clown of a man, clumped down the ladder from the bridge to defeat the enchantment of the moment. DeCastros held sway....
Simon Grover always felt like a goldfish in a coptercab. The plexiglass bubble afforded full 360 degree vision, but people could also see you from the crowded traffic lanes above a big city. "Hurry," said Simon Grover, a small, energetic man with close-set hazel eyes and a stubborn chin. "I'm hurrying," the pilot told him with frustrating indifference. In another few moments he would be safe. He squirmed around and saw another copter rise above the express lane and close the gap between them. It had never been this close before. The aquamarine roof of the Marriage Building loomed ahead, then swelled up at them. The other copter buzzed closer. "Don't see any landing space," the pilot said laconically. Simon squinted down anxiously. The copters were lined up in neat but crowded rows on the rooftop, with hardly more than walking space between them. "Hover," Simon pleaded. "I'll jump." "I...
Steven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable child did not like perfection. The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered, were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face wore an expression of pure distaste. A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies, and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle....
It wasn't the grim thought that he would be dead in a few moments that filled the mind of Don Moffat so much as the bitter realization that a sixteen-year-old suspicion had been confirmed too late. Across the small room a mad light burned in the blood-shot eyes of his uncle. In spite of the raw liquor he had drunk, the grimy paw that held the old electronic gun was steady. Beyond the battered hut's open door heat-blasted desert pulsated as a tiny sun beat savagely down on the arid, sterile wastes from the inferno's distant rim. It was that southern rim, a mere uneven thread of rust, to which Don had raised his eyes so many times that day, his heart light with the thought that he was going to Propontis. And from Propontis to a greener world beyond—a world he had dreamed of one day seeing; a world...
I had been asleep when a terrific noise awoke me. I rose up on my couch in the cabin and gazed wildly around, dazed with the feeling that something extraordinary had happened. By degrees becoming conscious of my surroundings, I saw Captain Wallace, Dr. Merryferry, Astronomer Starbottle, and Master-at-Arms Flathootly beside me. "Commander White," said the captain, "did you hear that roar?" "What roar?" I replied. "Where are we?" "Why, you must have been asleep," said he, "and yet the roar was enough to raise the dead. It seemed as if both earth and heaven were split open." "What is that hissing sound I hear?" I inquired. "That, sir," said the doctor, "is the sound of millions of flying sea-fowl frightened by the awful noise. The midnight sun is darkened with the flight of so many birds. Surely, sir, you must have heard that dreadful shriek. It froze the blood...
Blue Boy's rating was high and his fans were loyal to the death—anyone's death! avir gingerly fitted the round opening in the bottom of the silvery globe over the top of his hairless blue skull. He pulled the globe down until he felt tiny filaments touching his scalp. The tips of the wires were cold. The moderator then said, " Dreaming Through the Universe tonight brings you the first native Martian to appear on the dreamwaves—Gavir of the Desert Men. With him is his guardian, Dr. Malcomb Rice, the noted anthropologist." Then the moderator questioned Malcomb, while Gavir nervously awaited the moment when his thoughts would be transmitted to millions of Earthmen. Malcomb told how he had been struck by Gavir's intelligence and missionary-taught ability to speak Earth's language, and had decided to bring Gavir to Earth. The moderator turned to Gavir. "Are you anxious to get back to Mars?"...
The most dangerous, utterly vicious carnivorous animal the Galactics knew had escaped ... to Earth! Because contact with Earth was forbidden, they knew little of Earth ... which led to certain false conclusions. BY ROGER DEE Illustrated by Barbereis ■ The field of the experimental Telethink station in the Florida Keys caught the fleeing Morid’s attention just as its stolen Federation lifeboat plunged into the outer reaches of nightside atmosphere. The Morid reacted with the instant decision of a harried wolf stumbling upon a dark cave that offers not only sanctuary but a lost lamb for supper as well. With the pursuing Federation ship hot on its taloned heels, the Morid zeroed on the Telethink signals—fuzzy and incomprehensibly alien to its viciously direct mentality, but indicating life and therefore food—and aimed straight for their source. The lifeboat crashed headlong in the mangroves fringing Dutchman’s Key, perhaps ten miles west of...
Ericson returned to an awareness of his personal identity quite suddenly. He had an impression that it was a long time, months at least, since he had been in a state of normal consciousness. At the back of his mind a memory of pain had imprinted itself as a signet makes an impression in hot wax; he shied away from it. "Where am I?" he asked. The green-skinned girl squatting beside him in the coppice looked at him sideways out of her dark jade eyes. "Hungry?" she asked. "But where am—yes, I am hungry. Yes." Mnathl—he knew, somehow, that that was her name. Didn't he remember her from the other side of the gulf in his memory, from the days when he had begged food in the streets of Penhairn? Mnathl handed him a nicely-roasted bosula rib. He ate it avidly. He had always thought the bosula was the best...