I suppose it started some time back, even before the astronomers discovered it, and certainly long before I found out. How far back I have no idea; thousands of years, perhaps, or more. But the first ...

His arms were very tired, but he lifted the chisel and mallet again. He was almost through; only a few more letters and the inscription, cut deeply into the tough granite, would be finished. He rounde...

They never did discover whose fault it was. Fannia pointed out that if Donnaught had had the brains of an ox, as well as the build, he would have remembered to check the tanks. Donnaught, although twi...

Carrin decided that he could trace his present mood to Miller’s suicide last week. But the knowledge didn’t help him get rid of the vague, formless fear in the back of his mind. It was foolish. Miller...

The leech was waiting for food. For millennia it had been drifting across the vast emptiness of space. Without consciousness, it had spent the countless centuries in the void between the stars. It was...

Eddie McDermott paused at the door, then caught his breath and tiptoed into the classroom and to his seat. Mort Eddison, his best friend, looked at him reprovingly; the class had been in session for a...

When Gelsen entered, he saw that the rest of the watchbird manufacturers were already present. There were six of them, not counting himself, and the room was blue with expensive cigar smoke. “Hi, Char...

Answerer was built to last as long as was necessary⁠—which was quite long, as some races judge time, and not long at all, according to others. But to Answerer, it was just long enough. As to size, Ans...

Anders lay on his bed, fully dressed except for his shoes and black bow tie, contemplating, with a certain uneasiness, the evening before him. In twenty minutes he would pick up Judy at her apartment,...

“Come right in, gentlemen,” the Ambassador waved them into the very special suite the State Department had given him. “Please be seated.” Colonel Cercy accepted a chair, trying to size up the individu...

“That hand didn’t move, did it?” Edwardson asked, standing at the port, looking at the stars. “No,” Morse said. He had been staring fixedly at the Attison Detector for over an hour. Now he blinked thr...

Mark Rogers was a prospector, and he went to the asteroid belt looking for radioactives and rare metals. He searched for years, never finding much, hopping from fragment to fragment. After a time he s...

Pid the Pilot slowed the ship almost to a standstill, and peered anxiously at the green planet below. Even without instruments, there was no mistaking it. Third from its sun, it was the only planet in...

Hellman plucked the last radish out of the can with a pair of dividers. He held it up for Casker to admire, then laid it carefully on the workbench beside the razor. “Hell of a meal for two grown men,...

The space freighter Queen Dierdre was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the Earth-Mars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her e...

With so much at stake, Charles Dennison should not have been careless. An inventor cannot afford carelessness, particularly when his invention is extremely valuable and obviously patentable. There are...

“Absolutely impossible,” declared Professor Carver. “But I saw it,” said Fred, his companion and bodyguard. “Late last night, I saw it! They carried in this hunter⁠—he had his head half ripped off⁠—an...

The sandcar moved smoothly over the rolling dunes, its six fat wheels rising and falling like the ponderous rumps of tandem elephants. The hidden sun beat down from a dead-white sky, pouring heat into...

The Quedak lay on a small hilltop and watched a slender jet of light descend through the sky. The feather-tailed jet was golden, and brighter than the sun. Poised above it was a glistening metallic ob...

The Quedak lay on a small hilltop and watched a slender jet of light descend through the sky. The feather-tailed jet was golden, and brighter than the sun. Poised above it was a glistening metallic ob...

The big gaff-headed schooner was pointed directly at the reef-enclosed island, moving toward it with the solidity of an express train. The sails billowed under powerful gusts of the northwest breeze, ...

The big gaff-headed schooner was pointed directly at the reef-enclosed island, moving toward it with the solidity of an express train. The sails billowed under powerful gusts of the northwest breeze, ...

Edward Eakins walked through the jungle with a long-handled spade on his shoulder, sucking reflectively on a piece of candy. It was the first he’d had in weeks, and he was enjoying it to the utmost. H...

At the camp, rifles and revolvers were hastily wiped clean of cosmoline and passed around. Binoculars were taken out and adjusted. Cartridges were divided up, and the supply of knives, machetes and ha...

Returning to their camp, the men were in a mood of thorough depression. They couldn’t understand what had happened to Eakins and they didn’t feel like speculating on it. The ravaging afternoon sun bea...

The wind died. Huge gray thunderheads piled up in the sky to the southeast, their tops lost in the upper atmosphere, their black anvil bottoms pressing the hot still air upon the island. The sun had l...

Drake removed the back from the transmitter and scowled at the compact mass of tubes and wiring. Those metal boxlike things were probably condensers, and the waxy cylindrical gadgets might or might no...

Rain pelted the iron roof and the gusts of wind increased in intensity. There were rumbles of distant thunder. But within the copra shed, the air was hot and still. The gasoline lantern hanging from t...

Sheckley revised this story, retitling it “Shape,” for the 1954 short story collection Untouched by Human Hands. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩ Sheckley revised this story, retitling it “Untouched by Human Hands,” f...