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  The Classic American Short Stories MEGAPACK®, Vol. 1.

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  THE GOLDEN AGE OF PULP FICTION

  1. George Allan England

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF MYSTERY AND CRIME

  1. Fletcher Flora

  2. Ruth Chessman

  * Not available in the United States

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  ***Out of print.

  FREE PROMO MINI-MEGAPACKS®

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  The Poul Anderson MINIPACK™

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  OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

  The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany MEGAPACK®”)

  The Wildside Book of Fantasy

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  Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

  More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

  X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

  INTRODUCTION

  These are stories from the dawn of my career—the earliest of them was written about sixty years ago—and they are as surprised as I am still to be alive here in the second decade of the 21st century.

  I began reading science fiction when I was a boy—H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and then such magazines as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction—and I started writing it almost at once, sending my first stories off to the magazines of the day when I was 13. The editors sent them back, of course—first with printed rejection slips, then with encouraging letters—and, by 1954, when I was in my late teens and my junior year at college, with checks. Very quickly I found myself launched as a professional writer while still an undergraduate, making three sales in 1954, more than two dozen in 1955, and more in 1956 than I want to take the time now to count. By then it was clear to me that I was going to be able to make my living by writing, and when I got my B.A. degree from Columbia in June, 1956, I set up shop immediately as a full-time writer, and remained one for the next six decades, until, in my seventies, I began to slide off into retirement.

  The oldest story in this book is “The Desiccator,” which I wrote some time in 1954 and sold, a year or so later, to the very capable editor Robert W. Lowndes, whose misfortune it was to love science fiction dearly but to be given a rock-bottom editorial budget by his penurious publisher. It was just a li
ttle one-punch joke of a story, but Lowndes needed it to fill a hole in the May, 1956 issue of his magazine, The Original Science Fiction Stories, and paid me $24 for it. That doesn’t sound like very much, and in fact it wasn’t, but the 1956 dollar had at least ten times the purchasing power of today’s money, so my $24 fee (minus $2.40 for my agent) was enough to buy dinner for two at almost any pretty good Manhattan restaurant.

  Bob Lowndes and I quickly became friends—he gave me my first cat, in December, 1956—and he bought a great many stories from me for The Original Science Fiction Stories (which we all referred to simply as “The Original”) and its companion, Future Science Fiction. A number of them are reprinted here: “The Lonely One,” “The Songs of Summer,” “Neutral Planet,” “Prime Commandment,” “Delivery Guaranteed,” “The Isolationists,” and “The Woman You Wanted.” Because I was so prolific, some of these appeared under pseudonyms: “The Isolationist” as by “George Osborne” and several of the others as by “Calvin M. Knox.”

  There were plenty of other science fiction magazines in those days, and I wrote for them all. Larry Shaw edited two, the fairly sophisticated Infinity Science Fiction and a companion dedicated to fast-paced action stories, appropriately called Science Fiction Adventures. I had a story in nearly every issue of Infinity and wrote Science Fiction Adventures almost single-handed, with one or two long stories in each issue and sometimes more. (Four of them are here, “Spacerogue,” “There Was an Old Woman,” “Ozymandias,” and “Valley Beyond Time.”) About the same time I became a staff writer for Howard Browne’s Amazing Stories and Fantastic, who also wanted old-fashioned slam-bang pulp adventure fiction, and I worked hard at supplying it, turning in two or three stories a month for him. That long list is represented in this collection by “Postmark Ganymede,” “The Happy Unfortunate,” and “The Hunted Heroes.” (The titles of the last two were invented by editor Browne; I don’t remember what my original ones were.) At the same time I was writing for the two top magazines of the era, John W. Campbell’s Astounding and Horace Gold’s Galaxy. Those two magazines paid much more per word than the lesser titles of the field, but their editors were very demanding indeed, and it was always a red-letter day when I sold something to them. “Birds of a Feather” went to Galaxy, and “Point of Focus” to Campbell. Both were published in 1958, which by then was my fourth year as a very active professional writer.

  It was a heady time. I loved writing all those stories, some of them at breakneck speed. (Occasionally I did a story in the morning, knocked off for lunch, and did another in the afternoon.) Eventually most of the magazines that were my regular markets went out of business, and I gave up short-story writing in favor of doing books, though I never completely abandoned the shorter form even when novels were my primary source of income. The stories collected here, though, represent the furious productivity of my first years as a writer, showing not only the flaws but also the fierce energy with which all those stories came tumbling from my red-hot typewriter.

  —Robert Silverberg

  February, 2016

  ALAREE

  Originally published in Saturn Science Fiction, March 1958.

  When our ship left its carefully planned trajectory and started to wobble through space in dizzy circles, I knew we shouldn’t have passed up that opportunity for an overhauling on Spica IV. My men and I were anxious to get back to Earth, and a hasty check had assured us that the Aaron Burr was in tiptop shape, so we had turned down the offer of an overhaul, which would have meant a month’s delay, and set out straight for home.

  As so often happens, what seemed like the most direct route home turned out to be the longest. We had spent far too much time on this survey trip already, and we were rejoicing in the prospect of an immediate return to Earth when the ship started turning cartwheels.

  Willendorf, computerman first class, came to me looking sheepish, a few minutes after I’d noticed we were off course.

  “What is it, Gus?” I asked.

  “The feed network’s oscillating, sir,” he said, tugging at his unruly reddish-brown beard. “It won’t stop, sir.”

  “Is Ketteridge working on it?”

  “I’ve just called him,” Willendorf said. His stolid face reflected acute embarrassment. Willendorf always took it personally whenever one of the cybers went haywire, as if it were his own fault. “You know what this means, don’t you, sir?”

  I grinned. “Take a look at this, Willendorf,” I said, shoving the trajectory graphs towards him. I sketched out with my stylus the confused circles we had been traveling in all morning. “That’s what your feed network’s doing to us,” I said, “and we’ll keep on doing it until we get it fixed.”

  “What are you going to do, sir?”

  I sensed his impatience with me. Willendorf was a good man, but his psych charts indicated a latent desire for officerhood. Deep down inside, he was sure he was at least as competent as I was to run this ship and probably a good deal more so.

  “Send me Upper Navigating Technician Haley,” I snapped. “We’re going to have to find a planet in the neighborhood and put down for repairs.”

  It turned out there was an insignificant solar system in the vicinity, consisting of a small but hot white star and a single unexplored planet, Terra-size, a few hundred million miles out. After Haley and I had decided that that was the nearest port of refuge, I called a general meeting…

  Quickly and positively I outlined our situation and explained what would have to be done. I sensed the immediate disappointment, but, gratifyingly, the reaction was followed by a general feeling of resigned pitching in. If we all worked, we’d get back to Earth, sooner or later. If we didn’t, we’d spend the next century flip-flopping aimlessly in space.

  After the meeting we set about the business of recovering control of the ship and putting it down for repairs. The feed network, luckily, gave up the ghost about ninety minutes later; it meant we had to stoke the fuel by hand, but at least it stopped that accursed oscillating.

  We got the ship going, and Haley, navigating by feel in a way I never would have dreamed possible, brought us into the nearby solar system in hardly any time at all. Finally we swung into our landing orbit and made our looping way down to the surface of the little planet.

  I studied my crew’s faces carefully. We had spent a great deal of time together in space—much too much, really, for comfort—and an incident like this might very well snap them all if we didn’t get going again soon enough. I could foresee disagreements, bickering, declaration of opinion where no opinion was called for.

  I was relieved to discover that the planet’s air was breathable. A rather high nitrogen concentration, to be sure—82 percent—but that left 17 percent for oxygen, plus some miscellaneous inerts, and it wouldn’t be too rough on the lungs. I decreed a one-hour free break before beginning repairs.

  Remaining aboard ship, I gloomily surveyed the scrambled feed network and tried to formulate a preliminary plan of action for getting the complex cybernetic instrument to function again, while my crew went outside to relax.

  Ten minutes after I had opened the lock and let them out, I heard someone clanking around in the aft supplies cabin.

  “Who’s there?” I yelled.

  “Me,” grunted a heavy voice that could only be Willendorf’s. “I’m looking for the thought-converter, sir.”

  I ran hastily through the corridor, flipped up the latch on the supplies cabin, and confronted him. “What do you want the converter for?” I snapped.

  “Found an alien, sir,” he said laconically.

  My eyes widened. The survey chart said nothing about intelligent extraterrestrials in this limb of the galaxy, but then again this planet hadn’t been explored yet.

  I gestured towards the rear cabinet. “The converter helmets are in there,” I said. “I’ll be out in a little while. Make sure y
ou follow technique in making contact.”

  “Of course, sir.” Willendorf took the converter helmet and went out, leaving me standing there. I waited a few minutes, then climbed the catwalk to the air lock and peered out.

  They were all clustered around a small alien being who looked weak and inconsequential in the midst of the circle. I smiled at the sight. The alien was roughly humanoid in shape, with the usual complement of arms and legs, and a pale-green complexion that blended well with the muted violet coloring of his world. He was wearing the thought-converter somewhat lopsidedly, and I saw a small green furry ear protruding from the left side. Willendorf was talking to him.

  Then someone saw me standing at the open air lock, and I heard Haley yell to me, “Come on down, Chief!”

  They were ringed around the alien in a tight circle. I shouldered my way into their midst. Willendorf turned to me.

  “Meet Alaree, sir,” he said. “Alaree, this is our commander.”

  “We are pleased to meet you,” the alien said gravely. The converter automatically turned his thoughts into English, but maintained the trace of his oddly inflected accent. “You have been saying that you are from the skies.”

  “His grammar’s pretty shaky,” Willendorf interposed. “He keeps referring to any of us as ‘you’—even you, who just got here.”

  “Odd,” I said. “The converter’s supposed to conform to the rules of grammar.” I turned to the alien, who seemed perfectly at ease among us. “My name is Bryson,” I said. “This is Willendorf, over here.”

  The alien wrinkled his soft-skinned forehead in momentary confusion. “We are Alaree,” he said again.

  “We? You and who else?”

  “We and we else,” Alaree said blandly. I stared at him for a moment, then gave up. The complexities of an alien mind are often too much for a mere Terran to fathom.

  “You are welcome to our world,” Alaree said after a few moments of silence.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I turned away, leaving the alien with my men. They had twenty-six minutes left of the break I’d given them, after which we would have to get back to the serious business of repairing the ship. Making friends with floppy-eared aliens was one thing, getting back to Earth was another.