“I’m glad you came,” said Chalmers. He was sitting by the window and his face was very pale. Two tall candles guttered at his elbow and cast a sickly amber light over his long nose and slightly recedi...

“I’m glad you came,” said Chalmers. He was sitting by the window and his face was very pale. Two tall candles guttered at his elbow and cast a sickly amber light over his long nose and slightly recedi...

When Chalmers phoned the following morning my first impulse was to hang up the receiver immediately. His request was so unusual and his voice was so wildly hysterical that I feared any further associa...

The following is a condensation of two announcements which appeared in the Partridgeville Gazette for July 3, 1928: Earthquake Shakes Financial District At 2 o’clock this morning an earth tremor of un...

Report of James Morton, chemist and bacteriologist: My dear Mr. Douglas: The fluid sent to me for analysis is the most peculiar that I have ever examined. It resembles living protoplasm, but it lacks ...

Excerpt from The Secret Watchers by the late Halpin Chalmers: What if, parallel to the life we know, there is another life that does not die, which lacks the elements that destroy our life? Perhaps in...

Bill Cullen shaded his eyes with his hand and stared at the empty skyline. His arms, as he stood in the glittering light, showed scraggy and emaciated and his features were pinched and black. There ha...

I was out in space with Joan for the sixth time. It might as well have been the eighth or tenth. It went on and on. Every time I rebelled Joan would shrug and murmur: “All right, Richard. I’ll go it a...

I was out in space with Joan for the sixth time. It might as well have been the eighth or tenth. It went on and on. Every time I rebelled Joan would shrug and murmur: “All right, Richard. I’ll go it a...

I thought of Earth as we fell. Tingling song, and bright awakenings and laughter and joy and grief. Woodsmoke in October, tall ships and the planets spinning and hurdy-gurdies in June. I sat grimly by...

A half hour later we had our recordings. Joan sat facing me on the elevated pilot dais, her head swathed in bandages. Dawson and the two other members of our crew stood just beneath us, their faces so...

Horror and sick revulsion came into me as I stared down at the great wasps, with their many-faceted eyes seeming to probe the Jovian mists through a solid metal bulkhead! They thought we were Jovian c...

Lawton enjoyed a good fight. He stood happily trading blows with Slashaway Tommy, his lean-fleshed torso gleaming with sweat. He preferred to work the pugnacity out of himself slowly, to savor it as i...

We stood before the airlock, the old man and I, and watched them go out. Ellison was a granite man and I was just the lad who threw the switches. I was new at it. They had sent me out with a pat on th...

You’ve seen them⁠—the old ships, the battered and ruined ships, the ships that have made one voyage too many, and are so ancient you can’t remember their names or the reputations they’ve earned for th...

You’ve seen them⁠—the old ships, the battered and ruined ships, the ships that have made one voyage too many, and are so ancient you can’t remember their names or the reputations they’ve earned for th...

I stared at him uneasily. He was talking like an idiot. I knew that Jupiter itself would have to dwindle to a small disk before Callisto could become a pin point of light. When you take off from a lit...

I crawled out into the void on my hands and knees, clinging to the rough hull, digging with my magnetic irons into the thick coating of meteoric dust and grit and rubble the ship had picked up in deep...

We made as good a landing as could be expected, considering the way my hands shook when I brought her down. Right smack in the middle of La Guardia field! It’s the biggest skyport in the System, and y...

Charley Grimes was a big man who had been everywhere in the Solar System and collected trophies which were as strange and shining as the stories he liked to tell. His face was as gaunt as the jungle m...

The sky was harsh with the flare of rocket jets when Captain Ralph Langford emerged from his deep space cruiser on the Mars City landing field. There was a girl standing alone at the far end of the fi...

The sky was harsh with the flare of rocket jets when Captain Ralph Langford emerged from his deep space cruiser on the Mars City landing field. There was a girl standing alone at the far end of the fi...

A grave-faced physician met Langford at the end of the corridor and beckoned him into a small white-walled room. The physician was not talkative; he didn’t need to be. The girl who sat under the brigh...

Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan’s eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No⁠—not a room. A...

Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes. It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew t...

Jimmy watched the Natchez Belle draw near, a shining eagerness in his stare. He stood on the deck of the shantyboat, his toes sticking out of his socks, his heart knocking against his ribs. Straight d...

Steve found the mirror in the great northwestern desert. It was lying half-buried in the sand, and the wind howled in fury over it, and when he bent to pick it up the sun smote him like a shining blad...

“There will be a great many changes, Ned,” Cynthia Jackson said. She stared out the viewport at the little green world which the contact rocket Star Mist was swiftly approaching on warp-drive. Her hus...

The children were coming home. Elwood could see them from the cottage doorway, shouting and rejoicing in the bright October sunlight. They carried lunch baskets and⁠—as they came tripping toward him a...

There was death in the camp. I knew when I awoke that it had come to stand with us in the night and was waiting now for the day to break and flood the desert with light. There was a prickling at the b...

There was death in the camp. I knew when I awoke that it had come to stand with us in the night and was waiting now for the day to break and flood the desert with light. There was a prickling at the b...

The man on the sand had no top to his head. His skull had been crushed and flattened so hideously that he seemed like a wooden figure resting there⁠—an anatomical dummy with its skull-case lifted off....

Bill nodded at Harry. “You’d better stay here. Tom and I will be asking some pointed questions, and our first move will depend on the answers we get. Don’t let anyone come snooping around this shack. ...

It all happened so fast I was caught off balance. In the harsh Martian sunlight human emotions can be as unstable as a wind-lashed dune. A crazy thought flashed through my mind: Will Molly believe thi...

Daring Moonson, he was called. It was a proud name, a brave name. But what good was a name that rang out like a summons to battle if the man who bore it could not repeat it aloud without fear? Moonson...

Sally Anders had never really thought of herself as a wallflower. A girl could be shy, couldn’t she, and still be pretty enough to attract and hold men? Only this morning she had drawn an admiring loo...

Mr. Caxton was such an impatient, ill-tempered man it was surprising that the children cared to talk to him at all. It was even more surprising that the parents of Peter and Susan Ashley should have g...

To Will Durkin it seemed to be the realization of a long-cherished dream⁠—this return from town over a rutted dirt road, equipped and ready for a cruel duel with another man’s offspring. He raised his...

She was kneeling when I saw her, her face half in shadows, her girlishly slender figure mirrored by the cool-running stream at her feet. You’d think that on a planet like Dracona a man would be safe f...

“What every discerning theatergoer is searching for,” said Mr. Scanlon, “is a kind of sixth-sense heightening of perception. I choose to call it a superseding experience⁠—a blotting out of the mundane...

When Man left Earth forever the animals still carried on proudly. They knew, of course, that they could never hope to equal the Great One’s shining accomplishments. But even the warthog and the lowly ...