The Archer Five came in a big packing box, bound with steel ribbons and marked, This end up—handle with care. It was delivered at a subsidized government surplus price of fifty dollars to Hendricks' Sports and Hobbies Center, a store in Jarviston, Minnesota, that used to deal mostly in skin diving equipment, model plane kits, parts for souping up old cars, and the like. The Archer Five was a bit obsolete for the elegant U.S. Space Force... more...

A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! "See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...." Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old... more...

en minutes after the crackup, somebody phoned for the Army. That meant us. The black smoke of the fire, and the oily residues, which were later analyzed, proved the presence of a probable petroleum derivative. The oil was heavily tainted with radioactivity. Most likely it was fuel from the odd, conchlike reaction-motors, the exact principles of which died, as far as we were concerned, with the crash. The craft was mainly of aluminum, magnesium... more...

nder the glow of Saturn and his Rings, five of the airdomes of the new colony on Titan were still inflated. They were enormous bubbles of clear, flexible plastic. But the sixth airdome had flattened. And beneath its collapsed roof, propped now by metal rods, a dozen men in spacesuits had just lost all hope of rescuing the victims of the accident. Bert Kraskow, once of Oklahoma City, more recently a space-freighter pilot, and now officially just... more...

The space ship landed briefly, and John Endlich lifted the huge Asteroids Homesteaders Office box, which contained everything from a prefabricated house to toothbrushes for his family, down from the hold-port without help or visible effort. In the tiny gravity of the asteroid, Vesta, doing this was no trouble at all. But beyond this point the situation was—bitter. His two kids, Bubs, seven, and Evelyn, nine—clad in space-suits that... more...