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- Herausgeber: Wildside Press
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Cavern of the Shining Pool
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Table of Contents
THE CAVERN OF THE SHINING POOL, by Arthur Leo Zagat
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
THE CAVERN OF THE SHINING POOL,by Arthur Leo Zagat
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1937 by Popular Library, Inc., renewed 1965.
Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Oct. 1937.
Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt
Arthur Leo Zagat (1896-1949) was one of the more talented authors publishing during the Golden Age of science fiction. His writing was always smooth and crisp, with well-drawn characters and none of the clunky, old-fashioned prose that characterized the work of many genre authors in those days.
Although Zagat wrote a substantial body of science fiction (some in collaboration with Nat Schachner), he was truly a general pulp author, and he published more than 500 stories in many genres, including horror, mystery and crime, weird menace, and series hero stories (his heroes were Doc Turner and Red Finder). His work appeared in mainstream markets like Argosy alongside genre stories in Astounding, Dime Mystery, The Spider, Operator 5, and even the sexy “adult” pulps, such as Spicy Mystery Stories. He published much excellent science fiction in Argosy in the late 1930s and into the 1940s, including the “Tomorrow” series, set in a near-future, post-holocaust United States.
Zagat was born in New York, went to school at City College, and served in the U.S. military in Europe during World War I. After the war, he studied at Bordeaux University, then graduated from Fordham Law School. He taught writing at New York University.
In 1941, he was elected to the first national executive committee for the Authors League pulp writers’ section. During World War II, he held an executive position in the Office of War Information. After that war, Zagat was active in organizing writers' workshops and other assistance for hospitalized veterans.
Zagat was married to Ruth Zagat; the couple had one daughter, Hermine, from whom I purchased his copyrights a few years ago. He died of a heart attack on April 3, 1949, at his home in the Bronx at the age 53. Had he lived another 20 years and transitioned into paperback books, as many of his contemporaries did, the whole history of the science fiction field might have added his name to the list of greats.
CHAPTER 1
The Ether Eddy
I jerked down the result-lever of my Merton Calculator, and the rattle of its gears was loud in the deserted reaches of Flight Control Headquarters. The flight-graph imprinted itself on the space-chart, the thin red line that would guide the newly launched Phobos on her maiden voyage to Venus. I glanced through the transparent quartz wall at her tremendous bulk, vague on the vast tarmac of New York’s Spaceship Terminus in the brooding dark of 3 a.m.
The graph line I had just traced jogged erratically, a million and a half miles out, detouring the Phobos’ course a hundred thousand miles. That hump was why I was here, alone in the crystal hive. At midnight the message had pulsed in on the infrared ray from the domed air-cell on the Moon where gaunt men ceaselessly scan the skies that Trade may ply unhampered between Earth and her sister planets.
In their electelscopes a far-flung shimmer had appeared across the blackness of space and they had leaped to send warning of the one unconquered menace that harried the spaceways. An ether eddy!
Sometimes I thought the old memories drowned, the thirty-year long agony ended, that had wiped out for me forever the thrill of space flight, the transcendant joy of leaping from this wrinkled ball of ours and hurtling, godlike, among the stars. Then that word, that damned word that had stripped the winged rocket from my tunic and made of me a half alive juggler of charts and figures, would strike my ears. The years would fade and I would be in hell again.
As now. I saw Jay again, my brother, too poignantly real across the span of three decades. I saw the wide-shouldered, thick-legged bulk of him, a strand of yellow hair straggling over his brow, his broad-planed face flushed with the excitement of his first command. I felt my hand crushed in his own as I wished him the immemorial “Happy landing.”
The Luna’s
