If you should set a thief to catch a thief, what does it take to stop a racketeer…? Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald found a package before his door that morning, along with the milk. He took it inside and opened it. It was a remarkably fine meerschaum pipe, such as the sergeant had longed irrationally to […]

Legends do, of course, get somewhat distorted in the passage of time. In the future, the passage across space to other planets may cause a slight modification here and there … President O’Hanrahan of the planetary government of Eire listened unhappily to his official guest. He had to, because Sean O’Donohue was chairman of the […]

[Sidenote: The whole fighting fleet of the United Nations is caught in Kreynborg’s marvelous, unique trap.] It was August 19, 2037. The United Nations was just fifty years old. Televisors were still monochromatic. The Nidics had just won the World Series in Prague. Com-Pub observatories were publishing elaborate figures on moving specks in space which […]

The trouble with being a Superman,with Super powers, and knowing it, isit’s so easy to overlook the unpleasantpossibility of a super-superman! … The career of The Leader remains one of the mysteries of history. This man, illegitimate and uneducated, hysterical and superstitious, gathered about him a crowded following of those who had been discontented, but […]

They were broadcasts from nowhere–sinister emanations flooding in from space–smashing any receiver that picked them up. What defense could Earth devise against science such as this? The first broadcast came in 1972, while Mahon-modified machines were still strictly classified, and the world had heard only rumors about them. The first broadcast was picked up by […]

The importance of a matter is almost entirely a matter of your attitude. And whether you call something “a riot” or “a war” … well, there is a difference, but what is it? Nobody ever saw the message-torp. It wasn’t to be expected. It came in on a course that extended backward to somewhere near […]

PART I “… The profound influence of civilian morale upon thecourse of modern war is nowhere more clearly shown thanin the case of that monstrous war-engine popularlyknown as a ‘Wabbly.’ It landed in New Jersey Aug. 16,1942, and threw the whole Eastern Coast into a frenzy.In six hours the population of three States was in […]

I. The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward. It was not a graceful proceeding. The hands had been moving onward in their customary deliberate fashion, slowly and thoughtfully, but suddenly the people in the offices near the clock’s face heard an ominous creaking and groaning. There was […]

The problem was as neat a circle as one could ask for; without repair parts, they couldn’t bring in the ship that carried the repair parts! Bordman knew there was something wrong when the throbbing, acutely uncomfortable vibration of rocket blasts shook the ship. Rockets were strictly emergency devices, these days, so when they were […]

The old man just wanted to get back his memory–and the methods he used were gently hellish, from the viewpoint of the others…. Pop Young was the one known man who could stand life on the surface of the Moon’s far side, and, therefore, he occupied the shack on the Big Crack’s edge, above the […]