Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates … so how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or anything else…? Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops mottled red and […]

Sometimes getting a job is harder than the job after you get it–and sometimes getting out of a job is harder than either! The symphony was ending, the final triumphant paean soaring up and up, beyond the limit of audibility. For a moment, after the last notes had gone away, Paul sat motionless, as though […]

To translate writings, you need a key to the code–and if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born … how could the Martian be translated…? Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind had shifted since noon, while she had been […]

Evil men had stolen his treasure, and Raud set out with his deer rifle and his great dog Brave to catch the thieves before they could reach the Starfolk. That the men had negatron pistols meant little–Raud was the Keeper…. When he heard the deer crashing through brush and scuffling the dead leaves, he stopped […]

Despite Mr. Shakespeare,wealth and nameare both dross compared withthe theft of hope–and Maxwell had to roba whole planet of it! Standing at the armor-glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the […]

Miracles to order was a fine way for the paratimers to get mining concessions–but Nature can sometimes pull counter-miracles. And so can men, for that matter…. Through a haze of incense and altar smoke, Yat-Zar looked down from his golden throne at the end of the dusky, many-pillared temple. Yat-Zar was an idol, of gigantic […]

To upset the stable, mighty stream of time would probably take an enormous concentration of energy. And it’s not to be expected that a man would get a second chance at life. But an atomic might accomplish both– Blinded by the bomb-flash and numbed by the narcotic injection, he could not estimate the extent of […]