The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the contragravity field alternated on and off. Sometimes it rocked slightly, like a boat on the water, and, in the big screen which served in lieu of a window at the front of the control-cabin, the dingy-yellow landscape would seem to tilt a little. The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the clouds were green-gray. No human had ever set foot on the... more...

An Empty Room The house where the long trail started was one of gray walls, gray rooms and gray corridors, with carpets that muffled the feet which at intervals passed along them. It was a house of silence, brooding within the high fence that shut it and the grounds from a landscape torpid under the hot sun of summer, and across which occasionally drifted the lonely, mournful whistle of a train on a nearby railroad. Inside the house there was... more...

Banner ripped open his orders, read them, stared in disbelief for a quick moment, then cursed wildly while reaching for the telephone. "Hello, Gastonia? Yes, I got 'em. What kinda way to waste our time you lunkheads think ... oh, it's you, colonel!" Banner dropped the receiver and let it dangle. He sank into the only soft chair in the apartment and watched hypnotically as the phone's receiver limply coiled and uncoiled at the end of the wire.... more...

TWX WHITE HOUSE TO COL. K. A. BROWN COMMANDER PACIFIC SPACEPORT: CONGRESS PRESSURE HIGH INVESTIGATION IMMINENT MUST HAVE FULL INFORMATION WHY MOON LAUNCHES BEHIND SCHEDULE TWX COL. K. A. BROWN TO WHITE HOUSE: UNSEASONABLY CONSTANT BAD WEATHER PREVENTS LAUNCHING FOR PAST THREE WEEKS TWX WHITE HOUSE TO BROWN PSP: WHAT KIND OF BAD WEATHER TWX COL. K. A. BROWN TO WHITE HOUSE: FOG TWX WHITE HOUSE TO BROWN PSP: CONGRESS PRESSURE... more...

If Nature suddenly began to behave differently, what we consider obvious and elementary today might become—unthinkable. In the story THE DESPOILERS in the October 1947 Amazing Stories I raised the question, "Is there anything absolutely beyond human comprehension?" In that story I gave humanity a thousand years to give birth to one man who could comprehend the incomprehensible. The incomprehensible is harder to portray in a story than... more...

The kids who tried to jump Mike the Angel were bright enough in a lot of ways, but they made a bad mistake when they tangled with Mike the Angel. They’d done their preliminary work well enough. They had cased the job thoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it. Their mistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the Angel into account. There is a section of New York’s Manhattan Island, down on the... more...

The sight of an Earthman on Vega III, where it was impossible for an outlander to be, brought angry crowds to surround John Crownwall as he strode toward the palace of Viceroy Tronn Ffallk, ruler of Sector XII of the Universal Holy Empire of Sunda. He ignored the snarling, the spitting, the waving of boneless prehensile fingers, as he ignored the heavy gravity and heavier air of the unfamiliar planet. John Crownwall, florid, red-headed and... more...

Ares expedition turned away from the little telescope in the bow of the rocket. "Two weeks more, at the most," he remarked. "Mars only retrogrades for seventy days in all, relative to the earth, and we've got to be homeward bound during that period, or wait a year and a half for old Mother Earth to go around the sun and catch up with us again. How'd you like to spend a winter here?" Dick Jarvis, chemist of the party, shivered as he looked up... more...

VALLEY of the CROEN By LEE TARBELL There was a mysterious golden statue that always pointed one way—and it led to sudden death in the valley where flying disks landed. Like a lodestone drawn to a magnet, the tiny golden statue leaped from his hand and darted toward its huge counterpart. They say cross-eyed men are bad luck. He stood there, in my doorway, eyeing me up and down with those in-focused black eyes. His face was... more...

Sometimes, I know, I must seem a crotchety old man. "Old John Hanson," they call me, and roll their eyes as though to say, "Of course, you have to forgive him on account of his age." But the joke isn't always on me. Not infrequently I gain much amusement observing these cocky youngsters who strut in the blue-and-silver uniforms of the Service in which, until more or less recently, I bore the rank of Commander. There is young Clippen, for... more...