Fiction Books

CHAPTER I The IPV Arcturus Sets Out for Mars A narrow football of steel, the Interplanetary Vessel Arcturus stood upright in her berth in the dock like an egg in its cup. A hundred feet across and a hundred and seventy feet deep was that gigantic bowl, its walls supported by the structural steel and concrete of the dock and lined with hard-packed bumper-layers of hemp and fibre. High into the air... more...

They stood together at the parapet, their arms about each other's waists, her head against his cheek. Behind, the broad leaved shrubbery gossiped softly with the wind, and from the lower main terrace came music and laughing voices. The city of Wardshaven spread in front of them, white buildings rising from the wide spaces of green treetops, under a shimmer of sun-reflecting aircars above. Far... more...

1 To the world at large, of course, it was just another day. A different sort entirely at different places on the great, round, rolling Earth, but nothing out of the ordinary. It was Tuesday on one side of the Date Line and Monday on the other. It was so-and-so's wedding anniversary and so-and-so's birthday and another so-and-so would get out of jail today. It was warm, it was cool, it was... more...

PART 1 For seven weeks the Constellation had been plunging through hyperspace with her eight thousand colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with her communicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering. Up in the control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced against the red danger lines day and night. She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drives... more...

There wasn’t anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn’t anything overhead but sky. Joe Kenmore looked out the plane window past the co-pilot’s shoulder. He stared ahead to where the sky and cloud bank joined—it was many miles away—and tried to picture the job before him. Back in the cargo space of the plane there were four big crates. They contained the pilot gyros for the most... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SERMON. Four girls were together in a pleasant cottage room with a large window, over which fluttered some dry sticks, which would in due time bear clematis and Virginia creeper leaves. Three of them were Miss Lee's apprentices, and this room had been built out at the back of the baker's shop for them. The place was the property of the Lee family themselves, and nobody in... more...

Chapter I "I hear that John Andrews has given up his saloon; and a foolish thing it was. He was doing a splendid business. What could have induced him?" "They say that his wife was bitterly opposed to the business. I don't know, but I think it quite likely. She has never seemed happy since John has kept saloon." "Well, I would never let any woman lead me by the nose. I would... more...

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The Great Chelsea Fire On Sunday April 12, 1908, at about 11 o’clock A. M., an alarm was rung in for a fire in the works of the Boston Blacking Co. on West 3rd St., near the Everett line. The fire department responded immediately and succeeded in putting out the fire with but very little damage, but the forty-mile gale that was blowing at the time carried sparks from the fire to nearby houses, and... more...

THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and... more...