Stroke of Genius E-Book

Randall Garrett

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 40

Beschreibung

Crayley plotted a murder that was scientific in both motive and method—and as perfect as the mask of his face! Introduction by John Betancourt.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

ALIEN ENVOY, by Malcolm Jameson

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1944.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

INTRODUCTION

Malcolm Jameson (1891–1945) was an American science fiction author who based much of his work on his background as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Jameson’s first published fiction appeared in Astounding in 1938. He was active in American pulp magazines for only 7 years, but he helped set the standard for quality during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He wrote not just for John W. Campbell’s magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds, but also for magazines like Startling Stories and Weird Tales. His writing career began when complications from throat cancer limited his activity.

His stories of Solar System exploration about “Bullard of the Space Patrol” were posthumously collected in 1951 as a fixup novel and won the Boys Clubs of America Award. Reviewing that collection, critics Boucher and McComas praised Bullard as “the most successfully drawn series character in modern science fiction.” P. Schuyler Miller wrote that Jameson drew on his own naval experience to give the stories “a warm atmosphere of reality.”

Jameson’s story “Doubled and Redoubled” may be the earliest work of fiction to feature a time loop. And his story “Blind Alley” from Unknown was filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone (retitled “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville”).

Alfred Bester described meeting Jameson in about 1939 this way: “Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties... Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-oriented space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter, who turned everybody’s head.”

Had he lived another 20 years, the shape of the science fiction field might have been significantly different, with Jameson’s name up there with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and van Vogt.

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

ALIEN ENVOY,by Malcolm Jameson

The telecom rattled throatily, then cleared. The voice was that of Terry, bimmy fieldman.

“Hey, chief, there’s something coming in over the visio you ought to have a squint at. Think it’s right down our alley.”

Ellwood shoved the file he was examining aside. It was the usual slush about the unrest among the talags of Darnley Valley on Venus and dire prognostications of revolt, as if talag grousing was something new. They always bellyached, and nothing ever came of it. That’s the way talags were. Anyhow, it was routine and never should have been sent up to the chief’s desk. The ace bimmy—so-called from collapsing the initials of the Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence—preferred not to be bothered with trifles.

“I heard you, Terry,” he barked. “Let ’er flicker.”

The big screen across the room came to life. For a moment there was nothing but swirling gray chaos, and then the color deepened to a velvety purple-black. The screen gained depth and the coldly burning stars came out one by one. For some seconds that was all, then an object drifted into the field. It was a bulky, teardrop shaped thing of shimmering silvery green and atop it sat a squat turret out of which peeped the blunt nose of some kind of lethal projector. But the violet aura that usually surrounded the stubby gun was missing.

That was but one detail. Ellwood gasped as he ran his eye over the image of the entire ship as it inched its way into the middle of the field of view. The after half of it glowed and sparkled with incandescent lemon-yellow fire, fading slowly to a dull orange and then a cherry-red as the tortured hull radiated its fierce heat into space. The vessel had been caught in a katatron beam. That was evident, but it was not all. There was a gaping hole through the stern out of which glowing gases were glowing, only to be instantly dissipated in the vacuum of space.

“An Ursan!” exclaimed Ellwood. “We finally penetrated one! Who did it?”

“Commander Norcross, in the Penelope. He slammed a Mark IX torp into it, and it took. But, say, chief, that ain’t all the story. The whole battle was as screwy as could be. The Ursan didn’t fight back, and you know how tough they usually are. All it did was set up a terrible howl that sounded like all the static this side of Magellan rolled up in one ball. And take a gander at the co-ordinates.”

Ellwood’s gaze dropped to the pale white figures in the lower corner. There were three of them—celestial latitude and longitude and the angle of tilt. The wrecked Ursan was less than a million miles away—beyond the moon a little distance and up about twenty degrees.