Joe Mulloy lounged in the plushest chair in his luxurious office. All around him, on the walls, on the ceiling, even in strategic spots all over the floor, there were mirrors. Joe sneered at the place where the mirrors were most profuse; twenty or thirty perfectly identical Joes sneered back at him. He admired his sneer from every angle, shaping and changing the contemptuous look on his face with his hands, stroking it, much as other young men in a far earlier age had stroked and twisted their fine mustachios. As usual, Joe Mulloy was engrossed in his two favorite hobbies: narcissism and indolence. Joe's friends, of which there were very few, could have given you a fairly accurate resume of his character in five words, his sneer and his indolence. In the first respect they would have been right. Joseph Mulloy had been born with a sneer on his...
ILLUSTRATED by SUMMERS Frank Pembroke sat behind the desk of his shabby little office over Lemark's Liquors in downtown Los Angeles and waited for his first customer. He had been in business for a week and as yet had had no callers. Therefore, it was with a mingled sense of excitement and satisfaction that he greeted the tall, dark, smooth-faced figure that came up the stairs and into the office shortly before noon. "Good day, sir," said Pembroke with an amiable smile. "I see my advertisement has interested you. Please stand in that corner for just a moment." Opening the desk drawer, which was almost empty, Pembroke removed an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer. Pointing it at the amazed customer, he fired four .22 caliber longs into the narrow chest. Then he made a telephone call and sat down to wait. He wondered how long it would be before...
Slick Tennant had a hunch. The sixth sense that had made him king of the local rackets, that had warned him in time when three of his men fell to the machine guns of a rival gang, now told him that the Feds were after him, that they had evidence to send him up for a long stretch. But he was going where even the Feds couldn't extradite him. Slick Tennant was going to hide in the future. They didn't call him Slick for nothing. For months, a private dick in his pay had shadowed Dr. Richard Porter, inventor of a device called by reporters a time-travel machine, by comedians a crystal ball, and by Dr. Porter's fellow-psychiatrists a Metachronoscope. Slick knew the doctor was a widower, knew where he lived, knew pressure could be put upon him through Dickie Porter, aged seven. In Slick's pocket was a house-key Dr....
I t seemed only fitting and proper that the greatest of all leaps into space should start from Roosevelt Field, where so many great flights had begun and ended. Fliers whose names had rung—for a space—around the world, had landed here and been received by New York with all the pomp of visiting kings. Fliers had departed here for the lands of kings, to be received by them when their journeys were ended. Of course Lucian Jeter and Tema Eyer were disappointed that Franz Kress had beaten them out in the race to be first into the stratosphere above fifty-five thousand feet. There was a chance that Kress would fail, when it would be the turn of Jeter and Eyer. They didn't wish for his failure, of course. They were sports-men as well as scientists; but they were just human enough to anticipate the plaudits of the world which would...
The tenseness in the tiny court room was a live thing that you could feel clear down to your insoles. The thick silence was broken as the judge said solemnly: "Your objection will be taken under advisement by the court, Counselor. In what manner will the childhood of the defendant be relevant to this case, Mr. Prosecutor?" "It is my purpose to show, your Honor, that the defendant has been of unsound mind since birth, and therefore has long been a public menace, not merely a victim of circumstance as the defense would have us believe." The prosecuting attorney nodded briefly in the direction of the table for the defense. "Objection overruled," the judge said. "You may call your witness." "Thank you, your Honor." The prosecutor helped the flighty woman into the witness box. "Will you please give the court your name?" The woman simpered. "Ida Mae Holk. Mrs. Ida...
I saw this faire young maide, Abigaile Goodyeare, standing yonder on ye gallows and shee saith againe and againe that she was no witch, although the jury had founde her guilty of ... familiarity with Satan, the grand enemie of God & man; and that by his instigation and help ... afflicted and done harm to the bodyes and estates of sundry of his Majesties subjects.... —WITCHCRAFT IN EARLY AMERICA VOLUME II, CHAPTER 4 Nat Lyon looked nervously at the girl huddled in the corner of the time machine. There were white streaks down her face where recent tears had washed off the grime of several days spent in a primitive jail. Her almost jet black hair was a tangled mess, hanging in strings to her shoulders. He wrinkled his nose in distaste at the odor filling the small compartment. There was romance in history, he thought, when viewed in...
In the year 2200 A.D., Solar News Company became the biggest corporation in the nine planets. In the year 2220, Solar built the Heptagon, so called not because it was seven-sided but because it covered seven solid blocks, housed seven hundred thousand employees, and on its seventieth floor had a spacefield big enough to handle a fair-sized interplanetary patrol boat. In the early part of the Twenty-Third Century, war had been eliminated for so long that international affairs no longer had the deep significance they had had in the Twentieth Century. Controls were so rigid there had not been any startling development in economics or science for over a century, with the single exception of time-travel. People everywhere on Earth had finally resigned themselves to taking it easy, and so Solar News was just about on the rocks when along came time-travel, and Smullen, the sharp-eyed vice-president of Solar, foresaw...
Dr. Jules Craig, P.L.L., was unhappy. He was famous. He was young. He was talented, healthy, successful. He carried the distinguished degree of P.L.L. He had everything! But he was unhappy. He sat at his tastefully furnished desk, shuffling the Life-Line charts of the patient seated across from him. The patient awaiting the diagnosis was nervous. Poor devil! Craig thought. This man is going to die. He doesn't know it—and I can't tell him. A wave of pity swept through him, intensifying his own brooding unhappiness. Despite the fact he had instructed his psycho-color experts to design his inner consultation office in as soothing a shade as scientifically possible, the patient was sweating profusely, awaiting the verdict. The room was comfortably air-conditioned. The patient was a little fat man. The face was putty-white. Eyes shifty, breathing rapid, voice shaky and twisting of the hat. This man would be dead in...
The intercom roared fit to blow O'Rielly back to Venus. "Burner Four!" "On my way, sir!" At the first flash of red on the bank of meters Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly had slammed the safety helmet on his head; he was already throwing open the lock to the burner room. The hot, throbbing rumble whipped around him and near crushed his breath away. Power! Power of the universe trapped here and ready to destroy its captors given one chance! Swiftly O'Rielly unlocked the controls and reset them. The throbbing rumble changed tone. Old Callahan's voice crackled now through the helmet's ear contact. "Well, Mr. O'Rielly?" "Fusion control two points low, sir." O'Rielly wondered had Callahan passed out, was so long before the old Burner Chief demanded hoarsely, "Didn't you lock them controls before blast-off?" "If every control hadn't been locked in correct setting," O'Rielly answered from his own angry bewilderment, "the...
" The Universe is a mistake!" Thus spake Herbert Brande, a passenger on the Majestic , making for Queenstown Harbour, one evening early in the past year. Foolish as the words may seem, they were partly influential in leading to my terrible association with him, and all that is described in this book. Brande was standing beside me on the starboard side of the vessel. We had been discussing a current astronomical essay, as we watched the hazy blue line of the Irish coast rise on the horizon. This conversation was interrupted by Brande, who said, impatiently: "Why tell us of stars distant so far from this insignificant little world of ours—so insignificant that even its own inhabitants speak disrespectfully of it—that it would take hundreds of years to telegraph to some of them, thousands to others, and millions to the rest? Why limit oneself to a mere million of...
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....
Beyond the false windows she could see the reddish wasteland where dust clouds spun and shifted so slowly. She had been asleep. Now she stretched luxuriously beneath the crisp white sheet that the vapid August heat decreed. From memory to memory her dream-fogged mind drifted, and to the yet-to-be. It was good to remember, and to imagine, and to see and feel and hear.... She smiled. She was Ruth Halsey, fourteen, brunette, and pretty. Earl, and Harry, and Buhl had told her she was pretty. Especially Buhl. Buhl was her favorite date now. The room closed around her with its familiar colors and furnishings. Sometimes she would dream that she was elsewhere, unfamiliar, ugly places, but then she would awaken to the four long windows with their coarse beige drapes of monk's cloth and the fantasies were forever dispelled. Her eyes loved the two paintings, the dark curls of the...
Quibblers may shove dictionaries in my face till the end of the universe and I will always maintain that almost anything you can name is a matter of good luck or bad. Every great man owes his success to luck of some sort. What made him great is what he did with his luck after he got it. Had I been born eleven years before Senator Clive Littlebrook, I might have been brilliant to the point of stupidity, as he was. Nobody planned that I should be 24 when he was 35, and a space pilot instead of a senator. He had eleven years to get smarter than me. But all of his brilliance and all of my youthful innocence couldn't have prevented our being spacewrecked on a lonely, uninhabited planet. We knew it was lonely and thought it was uninhabited, as it almost was. It was the second planet...
Adventure is relative to one's previous experience. Sometimes, in fact, you can't even be sure you're having or not having one! To be given paid-up leisure and find yourself unable to create is unpleasant for any artist. To be stranded in a cluster of desert cabins with a dozen lonely people in the same predicament only makes it worse. So Tom Dorset was understandably irked with himself and the Tosker-Brown Vacation Fellowships as he climbed with the sun into the valley of red stones. He accepted the chafing of his camera strap against his shoulder as the nagging of conscience. He agreed with the disparaging hisses of the grains of sand rutched by his sneakers, and he wished that the occasional breezes, which faintly echoed the same criticisms, could blow him into a friendlier, less jealous age. He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that...
Ninon stretched. And purred, almost. There was something lazily catlike in her flexing; languid, yet ferally alert. The silken softness of her couch yielded to her body as she rubbed against it in sensual delight. There was almost the litheness of youth in her movements. It was true that some of her joints seemed to have a hint of stiffness in them, but only she knew it. And if some of the muscles beneath her polished skin did not respond with quite the resilience of the youth they once had, only she knew that, too. But they would again , she told herself fiercely. She caught herself. She had let down her guard for an instant, and a frown had started. She banished it imperiously. Frowns—just one frown—could start a wrinkle! And nothing was as stubborn as a wrinkle. One soft, round, white, long-nailed finger touched here, and here, and...
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...
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...
So thrilling were my experiences during that period, so overcrowded with feverish action and strong emotions was each wonderful moment, and so entirely changed are the conditions of life as I now find it, that it is with considerable difficulty that I recall in detail all that happened prior to my remarkable discovery which opened communication between Earth and Mars. One says "discovery" advisedly, but let it not be imagined that communication with the planet Mars was established as a result of any careful and systematic research, or that I possessed a subtle genius for astronomical science that was destined to introduce into society what must eventually revolutionize it. Nothing could be further from the facts. Into the daily grind of my absolutely uneventful career, burst the almost terrifying revelations with a suddenness that stunned me, while I was engaged in experiments of an entirely extraneous nature. Albeit one wonders...
Logan's way of laughing was bad. "There's a new body up in the air-lock, Brandon. Climb the rungs and have a look." Logan's eyes had a green shine to them, eager and intent. They were ugly, obscene. Brandon swore under his breath. This room of the Morgue Ship was crowded with their two personalities. Besides that, there were scores of cold shelves of bodies freezing quietly, and the insistent vibration of the coroner tables, machinery spinning under them. And Logan was like a little machine that never stopped talking. "Leave me alone." Brandon rose up, tall and thinned by the years, looking as old as a pocked meteor. "Just keep quiet." Logan sucked his cigarette. "Scared to go upstairs? Scared it might be your son we just picked up?" Brandon reached Logan in about one stride, and while the Morgue Ship slipped on through space, he clenched the coroner's blue...
Drifted beech leaves had made a soft, clean bed in a little hollow in a wood. The wood was beside a river, the trend of which was toward the east. There was an almost precipitous slope, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the wood, downward to the river. The wood itself, a sort of peninsula, was mall in extent and partly isolated from the greater forest back of it by a slight clearing. Just below the wood, or, in fact, almost in it and near the crest of the rugged bank, the mouth of a small cave was visible. It was so blocked with stones as to leave barely room for the entrance of a human being. The little couch of beech leaves already referred to was not many yards from the cave. On the leafy bed rolled about and kicked up his short legs in glee a little...
If I recall the conversation of that evening so minutely as to appear tedious, I must plead that this was the last occasion on which I saw Sir Spofforth alive. In such a case, one naturally remembers incidents and recalls words that otherwise might have been forgotten; besides, here were the two opposed opinions of life, as old as Christianity, confronting each other starkly. And, as will be seen, the test was to come in such manner as only one of us could have imagined. I picture old Sir Spofforth as on that evening: courteous, restrained, yet with the heat of conviction burning in his measured phrases; and Esther listening with quaint seriousness, turning from her father to Lazaroff and back, and sometimes to me, as each of us spoke. Outside, in the moonlight, the shadow of the Institute lay black across the garden of Sir Spofforth’s house. The dining-room...
By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Why should people hate vultures? After all, a vulture never kills anyone… Illustrated by Douglas T The launch carrying the mail, supplies and replacements eased slowly in toward the base, keeping the bulk of the Moon between itself and Earth. Captain Ebor, seated at the controls, guided the ship to the rocky uneven ground with the easy carelessness of long practice, then cut the drive, got to his walking tentacles, and stretched. Donning his spacesuit, he left the ship to go over to the dome and meet Darquelnoy, the base commander. An open ground-car was waiting for him beside the ship. The driver, encased in his spacesuit, crossed tentacles in a sloppy salute, and Ebor returned the gesture quite as sloppily. Here on the periphery, cast formalities were all but dispensed with. Ebor stood for a moment and watched the unloading. The cargo crew, used to...
The wall speaker in the control tower was crackling softly with space static when the voice first cut in. "Lorelei calling Venusport for landing. Over." Even across ten thousand miles of space the sharp New England twang clearly showed the origin of its owner. Joe flicked the transmitting stud and winked at the radar man. "Venusport to Lorelei. Come on in, you old space pirate. Use Ramp Four. Out." He glanced at the green spot on the radar sweep screen that was the Lorelei, entered a set of figures in the tower log, then leaned back in the chair in front of the control panels and lit a cigarette. "That Pop," he said, nodding vaguely at the radar screen and the log book, "must be damn near two hundred years old, and he's still the best pilot in the System. Used to have the All-Planetary run back when it was...
I could have taken that three hundred dollars and gone to school for a year, by washing dishes two hours a night. I had worked for that money, too; shocking wheat for twelve hours a day in the August sun is no vacation. But Slim Coleman convinced me that we could run that three hundred into enough to take us both for four years. I hadn't even had time to get a haircut—and I did want a haircut; now it was pretty shaggy. But Slim, diplomat that he is, didn't even seem to notice my hair. "I've got a real deal," he said, and his deep eyes were shining with enthusiasm. "Have you got any money?" "Some," I said cautiously. "It takes three hundred. Have you got that much?" I had intended to say no, but Slim has a way of fixing his deep, somber eyes on you that gives...