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...
There will, sooner or later, be problems of "space junk," and the right to dump in space. But not like this...! Illustrated by Schoenherr "Comrades," said the senior technician, "notice the clear view of North America. From here we watch everything; rivers, towns, almost the people. And see, our upper lens shows the dark spot of a meteor in space. Comrades, the meteor gets larger. It is going to pass close to our wondrous machine. Comrades ... Comrades ... turn to my channel. It is no meteor—it is square. The accursed Americans have sent up a house. Comrades ... an ancient automobile is flying toward our space machine. Comrades ... it is going to—Ah ... the picture is gone." Moscow reported the conversation, verbatim, to prove their space vehicle was knocked from the sky by a capitalistic plot. Motion pictures clearly showed an American automobile coming toward the Russian satellite....
In his garden, Negu Mah, the Callisto uranium merchant, sat sipping a platinum mug of molkai with his guest, Sliss the Venusian. Nanlo, his wife, pushing before her the small serving cart with its platinum molkai decanter, paused for an instant as she entered the shell of pure vitrite which covered the garden, giving it the illusion of out-of-doorness. Negu Mah sat at his ease, his broad, merry, half-Oriental face good-humored, his features given a ruddy tinge by the light of rising Jupiter, the edge of whose sphere was beginning to dominate the horizon. Sliss, the intelligent amphibian, squatted across from him in the portable tub of water which he carried with him whenever absent from the swamps of his native Venus. The amphibian's popping eyes turned toward her, the wide frog-face split in a smile of appreciation as Nanlo approached. She refilled their mugs deftly and withdrew. But before...
A lean wind wails through the age-old avenues of Dawningsburgh. Mornings, it brings sand from surrounding hills and scrubs at fresh paint, neon signs endlessly proclaiming the city's synthetic name and street markers in seven languages. At sunrise it prepares the dunes for footprints of scurrying guided tourists. When icy night clamps down and the intruders scamper to their hotels, the wind howls as it flings after them a day's collection of paper cups, bottle caps and other picnic offal. "Liars! Cheats!" whimpered Betsy O'Reilly as she tossed on the lumpy bed of her third class room and recalled the sky poster that had hypnotized her. Now, Betsy was disappointed and bored. Slim, pretty, freckled and pert, but ten years older than she wished, she had mortgaged her secretarial salary to engage once more in The Eternal Quest. And, as always, the quest was proving futile. Eligible bachelors shunned Dawningsburgh...
"Mr. Street, you are the foremost xenologist on Earth," the director of Extraterrestrial Investigations said to the tall man. "I know," Street said. "What do you know about the infamous criminal, Baker, the so-called 'Robin Hood' who is actually a scarlet fiend?" "Everything." "Surely not how he died." "Everything but that." The director put his briefcase on his knees. "Mr. Street, my agency received numerous accounts of his death, or deaths, on various worlds. Can you tell me which, if any, of these stories is true by studying our intelligence reports?" "Easily," Street said. "We have had Baker under observation many times by our planted Orwells—our peepbugs—but you must understand that we need absolute proof on him since he has supporters even on Earth, and in waiting for that proof, we lost contact often at vital moments." "I understand perfectly," Street assured him. I "Are there really space pirates?" Mrs....
December 8th, 1952, Two-Thirty A. M. After awhile the blinding light was like actual physical pressure against his tightly squinched eyes. He tried to burrow deeper into the protectively warm, cave-like place where he'd been safe from them for so long. But he couldn't escape them. Their hands, their big, red, hideously smooth hands had him, now. They were tugging and pulling at him with a strength impossible to fight. Still he struggled. He tried to cry out but there was no sound from his constricted throat. There were only the frightening noises from outside, louder, now. He tried to twist and squirm against the hands dragging him toward that harsh, blinding light. He was too small, too weak, compared to them. He couldn't fight them off. He felt himself being stretched and strained and forced with cruel determination. He didn't want to go out there . He knew what...
There are some who tell me it is a foolish war we fight. My brother told me that, for one, back in the Sunset Country. But then, my brother is lame and good for nothing but drawing pictures of the stars. He connects them with lines, like a child's puzzle, and so makes star-pictures. He has fish stars, archer stars, hunter stars. That, I would say, is what is foolish. Perhaps that is what started it all. I was looking at the stars, trying to see the pictures, when I should have been minding my sentry post. They took me like a baby, like a tot not yet given to the wearing of clothing. The hand came out of the darkness and clamped over my mouth, and I ceased my struggling when I felt a sharp blade pricking at the small of my back. At first I feared that they...
After space, there was always one more river to cross ... the far side of hatred and murder! Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS The bar didn't have a name. No name of any kind. Not even an indication that it had ever had one. All it said on the outside was: Cafe EAT Cocktails which doesn't make a lot of sense. But it was a bar. It had a big TV set going ya-ta-ta ya-ta-ta in three glorious colors, and a jukebox that tried to drown out the TV with that lousy music they play. Anyway, it wasn't a kid hangout. I kind of like it. But I wasn't supposed to be there at all; it's in the contract. I was supposed to stay in New York and the New England states. Cafe-EAT- Cocktails was right across the river. I think the name of the place was Hoboken, but I'm not...
Jeff Engel studied the feverish crowd hurrying through the subway turnstiles. As he checked each passing face against a card-index mind, he smiled to himself. Even when off duty, the habit persisted. There was always the chance he'd spot a face that would fit, one that would close another active file in Missing Persons Bureau. A mousey little guy slipped through a turnstile and bumped into a fat woman shopper. Engel glanced at the thin apologetic face and then at a briefcase bearing the faded initials, "C. G." As a train rumbled in and the noise of the commuters rose, something glinted at Engel's feet. He bent down, curious. It was a cheap fountain pen inscribed with the same initials. He caught a glimpse of the stranger on the crowded subway stairs. "Wait a minute, mister!" he yelled. When C. G. didn't turn, Engel hesitated, then pounded up the stairs...
It was a perfectly conventional tour, once around the Milky Way with stops at several of the major stars. It was supposed to take about eighty-eight million years so they planned to be back for supper. In the beginning the students had remained in a fairly close knot around mundo Karftahiti, their instructor, but as the tour progressed some of the more venturesome strayed further and further from the rest of the class. Dro Orena and Dro Xeluchli had wandered a greater distance than usual from the crowd and were jamming experimental thought webs into a large space vortex when Xeluchli signalled to Orena to tune her mind off the lecture frequency. It was against the rules, of course, but then Orena supposed Xeluchli would take the blame for her if they were caught, so she switched over to the conversational band. "Want to have some fun?" asked Xeluchli. Orena...
SHE was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, full of life and hope, and all set to conquer the world. Colin Fraser happened to be on vacation on Cape Cod, where she was playing summer stock, and went to more shows than he had planned. It wasn't hard to get an introduction, and before long he and Judy Sanders were seeing a lot of each other. "Of course," she told him one afternoon on the beach, "my real name is Harkness." He raised his arm, letting the sand run through his fingers. The beach was big and dazzling white around them, the sea galloped in with a steady roar, and a gull rode the breeze overhead. "What was wrong with it?" he asked. "For a professional monicker, I mean." She laughed and shook the long hair back over her shoulders. "I wanted to live under the name of Sanders,"...
Despite the widely publicized radar posts encircling our nation and the continuously alerted jet squadrons at its borders, the space ship was about to land before it was detected. It settled gracefully, quietly, onto an empty field in northern New Jersey. And so unexpected was the event, so unbelievable the fact that man was being visited by aliens from space, that it was a full half hour before the first extra was on the streets in New York, and forty minutes before the news buzzed through the Kremlin. It might have taken considerably longer for man in earth's more isolated areas to hear of the event had not the alien taken a hand at this point. Approximately an hour after the landing, into the mind of every human on earth, irrespective of nation, language, age, or intellect, came the thought telepathically: We come in peace. Prepare to receive our message....
This is the tale of Bradley after he left Fort Dinosaur upon the west coast of the great lake that is in the center of the island. Upon the fourth day of September, 1916, he set out with four companions, Sinclair, Brady, James, and Tippet, to search along the base of the barrier cliffs for a point at which they might be scaled. Through the heavy Caspakian air, beneath the swollen sun, the five men marched northwest from Fort Dinosaur, now waist-deep in lush, jungle grasses starred with myriad gorgeous blooms, now across open meadow-land and parklike expanses and again plunging into dense forests of eucalyptus and acacia and giant arboreous ferns with feathered fronds waving gently a hundred feet above their heads. About them upon the ground, among the trees and in the air over them moved and swung and soared the countless forms of Caspak's teeming life. Always...
Just in from a long haul searching for asteroid juncture points, Harvey entered the lobby of the Hotel de Mars and went straight to the registration desk. The woman at the desk, who was blond, and blue-eyed, and inclining to chubbiness, looked at him, smiled. The smile was of such quality that Harvey's singed brown face set into a mold of utter attention. Finally he let out his breath. "I want a room," said he, "on the Deimos side." He attentively studied the cheerful face while she made out slips, accepted his signature, accepted his money. After he had the key, after he had his change, after everything was taken care of, he still stood there. The woman smiled into his seamed eyes. "Was there something else?" Harvey said, noting the emptiness of her chubby ring-finger, "Ma'am, I'm an abrupt, outspoken man. I have no sense of humor. Some people...
See what happens when two conchologists get caught in a necromantic nightmare of their own. On his fortieth birthday Martin Sutter decided life was too short to continue in the rut that had been his existence for more than twenty years. He withdrew his savings from the Explosion City Third Federal Bank, stopped in a display room and informed a somewhat surprised clerk he was taking the electric runabout with the blue bonnet. The ground-car, complete with extras, retailed for a tidy three thousand credits. To accustom himself to the car's controls Sutter chose Highway 56 for a driving lesson. He tooled the electric runabout up into the third level, purred out across state at an effortless two hundred, then descended via a cloverleaf to ground tier and entered a maze of subsidiary roads that led through the summer countryside. In this manner he drove the major part of the...
ILLUSTRATED BY EMSH It was a very different thing, Algernon Weaver decided, actually to travel in space. When you read about it, or thought about it in terms of what you read, it was more a business of going from one name to another. Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to meditate on it—became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more understandable. Not that he had ever approved. No. He had that, at least, to look back upon; he had seen the whole enterprise as pure presumption, and had said so. Often. The heavens were the heavens, and Earth was Earth. It would have been better— much better for all concerned—if it had been left that way. He had held that opinion, he reminded himself...
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...
All things considered, I rate October 10th, 1920, as the most momentous day of my life. Why it should be so styled is not at once apparent. My career has not been unromantic; during many years I have rambled over the globe, courting danger wherever interest led me, and later on have splashed through shambles such as revolutions have seldom before been red with. More than once I have tripped near the cave where Death lies in ambush. I am now an old man, but my memory is green and vigorous. I can look back calmly on the varied spectacle of life and weigh each event impartially in the balance. And thus looking, I refer my most fateful experience to an hour during an afternoon conversation in my dull, dingy, severe-looking quarters in Bayswater. From romance to the commonplace is seldom a long trudge. On this occasion a quite commonplace...
Frost tossed an avenil wrapper in the space erviser's part reducer. "These people have found the secret of immortality," he said. "What a romantic temperament you have," Scott replied softly. "'The secret of immortality,' it sounds as dated as the philosopher's stone." "What do you mean? We're not immortal." "No, we're not—though you may not have noticed that the last report of the committee for India gives the life expectancy there now as seventy years. And because of consistently good medical care, you and I both look a good ten years younger than our actual chronological age." Scott was in his early thirties: he had the trim body and resilient skin of first maturity. "That's not immortality." "No, of course not. That's what I'm driving at. How do we arrest aging and prolong life? With some mysterious serum, by some dark business with a fantastic ray? Hocus-pocus of a sort...
The plagues that struck mankind could be attributed to one man. But was he fiend ... or savior? The blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged, separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurized slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth. She died. Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed, including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance. An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before. After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered travelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a man who carried...
"Now watch ," Remm said, indicating the native. Macker had been absent, exploring the countryside in the immediate vicinity of their landing place, and had not witnessed the capture of the native, or the tests his two companions made on it. Macker followed Remm's gaze to where the biped native sat hunched. The creature was bent into an ungainly position, its body crooked at incongruous angles, in such a way as to allow most of its weight to rest on a packing-box at the base of a middle angle. Its stubby feet, on the ends of thin, pipelike legs, rested against the floor of the space ship. Its body was covered, almost entirely, with an artificial skin material of various colors. Some of the colors hurt Macker's eyes. In the few places where the flesh showed through the skin was an unhealthy, pallid white. Slowly the creature's head swiveled on...
By going through channels, George worked up from the woodwork to the top brass! eorge," Clara said with restrained fury, "the least you could do is ask him. Are you a mouse or a worm?" "Well, I have gone out there and moved it every night," George protested, trying to reason with her without success. "Yes, and every morning he puts it back. George, so long as that trap is outside of our front door, I can never have a moment's peace, worrying about the children. I won't go on like this! You must go out and talk some sense into him about removing it at once." "I don't know," George said weakly. "They might not be happy to find out about us." "Well, our being here is their own fault, remember that," Clara snorted. "They deliverately exposed your great-great grandfather Michael to hard radiations. George," she continued fervidly, "all...
The first Venusian ship to reach Earth found a single isolated tribe of human beings roving the bushlands of a large island in the southern hemisphere. The Earthmen were without exception dark of skin and eye, and their hair, which was jet-black, was as kinky as koola wool. All were backward to the point of savagery, fleeing in superstitious terror before every attempt at communication. Val Conna and his crew—nine tall young men, fair-skinned and lordly and alike enough to have been brothers—made an exhaustive search that carefully bypassed ruined cities still radioactive past the safety point, and after ten days abandoned their quest in disappointment. "I find no resemblance between this remnant of Earth's people and ourselves," announced Mach Bren, expedition anthropologist, "except a bipedal structure which only bears out our theory of like species developing on like worlds, and this similarity is sharply negated by impossible divergence in...
Allen Kinderwood slowed his pace so his forelock would quit bobbing. The damn thing wasn't supposed to bob; it was supposed to be a sort of peaked crest above rugged, handsome features—a dark lock brushed carelessly aside by a man who had more important things to do than fuss with personal grooming. But no matter how carefully he combed it and applied lusto-set, it always bobbed if he walked too fast. But then, why should it matter now? He wasn't looking for a woman tonight. Not when his appointment with the Social Adjustment counsellors was tomorrow morning, and he would get a Departure Permit. Should get one, he corrected himself. But he had never heard of a petition for a DP being refused. He wanted to spend his last night in the city over here in the main park of C Sector, walking in the restless crowds, trying to settle...