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  Here are two king-size volumes of fine science fiction reading selected by one of America’s ranking sf authorities. They contain book-length novels, noveletes, and short stories—most of which have not appeared in any other anthology. As described by Anthony Boucher, they include: “a happy study in sheer mechanical gadgetry by the master of technological tales, George O. Smith”—“a powerful poetic prophecy by Rad Bradbury”—“a spirited pastiche of Sherlock Holmes by Poul Anderson”—and “a charming, sexy, and malicious caprice by Mildred Clingerman.” The range of material is tremendous, and the list of contributing authors reads like a Who’s Who of science fiction.

  Mr. Boucher has selected these stories with the unerring judgment that results from his background as author, reviewer, and editor. His aim has not been to make A TREASURY OF GREAT SCIENCE FICTION either a definitive anthology of well-known stories or a historical survey of the sf field but rather to collect “a good deal of good reading”—and every reader of this great anthology will agree that has been most successful.

  This book is for

  PHYLLIS

  as what is not?

  All of the characters in this hook are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  COPYRIGHT © 1959 BY ANTHONY BOUCHER

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  A Treasury of Great Science Fiction

  Volume One

  About the Books

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Anthony Boucher

  RE-BIRTH

  John Wyndham

  THE SHAPE OF THINGS THAT CAME

  Richard Deming

  PILLAR OF FIRE

  Ray Bradbury

  WALDO

  Robert A. Heinlein

  THE FATHER-THING

  Philip K. Dick

  THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

  Henry Kuttner

  C.L. Moore

  GOMEZ

  C.M. Kornbluth

  THE [WIDGET], THE [WADGET], AND BOFF

  Theodore Sturgeon

  SANDRA

  George P. Philip

  BEYOND SPACE AND TIME

  Joel Townsley

  THE MARTIAN CROWN JEWELS

  Poul Anderson

  THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER

  A.E. van Vogt

  Before the curtain . . .

  FIRST OF ALL, let’s reach a clear understanding of what this treasury is not.

  It is not a definitive anthology of the very best of all science fiction: such a collection would, inevitably, contain too many stories which are overfamiliar and readily accessible elsewhere.

  It is not a scholarly survey of the history and development of science fiction: too many stories of the utmost importance to the scholar are tough going for the lay reader.

  It is not, indeed, any kind of shaped or patterned anthology, but simply a very large collection of stories which are (I think) of high quality and (I hope) unfamiliar to many readers.

  Most of the stories here, including three of the book-length novels, are new to hard covers in America; nine of them have never appeared in book form at all. Only one story has been hitherto published in a science fiction anthology; and that one has been out of print for ten years.

  My primary concern was simply to get together a great deal of good reading in modem (1938-58) s.f. which had been overlooked by earlier anthologists; and I was astonished to find that, after the anthological Gold Rush of the 1950’s, there was so much high grade ore still unmined—enough to make the biggest s.f. anthology ever . . . and to trace, after all, an unintended pattern: the pattern of almost kaleidoscopic variety.

  When man entered the Space Age two years ago, the writers and editors of science fiction, who had so long been living in this new age, hoped for a fresh surge of reader interest, an expression of gratitude for accurate prophecy in the past and of interest in the possible accuracy of other, as yet unfulfilled prophecies.

  It seemed a logical enough expectation, but it was a fallacious one. The new readers did not arrive—to some extent, at least, because they were put off by the cry of the press (never happier than when it can claim a miracle and coin a cliché): “Science has caught up with science fiction!”

  Factually we have dipped a toe into the ocean of space. Science has caught up with the space flight concepts of s.f. to about the same extent that a child taking its first step has caught up with Herb Elliott.

  But facts are impotent against loud and frequent assertion. Readers believe that science has “caught up”; and somehow the very fact of s.f.’s accurate prophecies turns into a weapon against it, as if a literature of prophecy should become outmoded the instant one of its predictions was fulfilled.

  This is all fairly foolish, but even if it made some sense it still should not deter readers from the joys of that speculative entertainment known as science fiction. Scientific prophecy, technological prediction—this is only one of s.f.’s functions. And even if science “caught up” with every single scientific datum in these stories[*], they would still remain enjoyable in their own various manners as fiction.

  There is good solid straight science-cum-fiction here, especially by Robert A. Heinlein, than whom no one writes better science fiction in its strictest straitest sense.

  But there are also (and all falling within the general editors’-publishers’-readers’ definition of s.f.):

  —a dazzlingly inventive adventure novel by Alfred Bester which is deliberately (and successfully) modeled on Alexandre Dumas;

  —a serious and bitter story by Judith Merril, of such literary quality that Martha Foley chose it for The Best American Short Stories;

  —a happy study in sheer mechanical gadgetry by the master of technological tales, George O. Smith;

  —a charming, sexy, and malicious caprice by Mildred Clingerman;

  —a warm and plausible picture of Abraham Lincoln by Oscar Lewis;—a spirited pastiche of Sherlock Holmes by Poul Anderson;

  —a vivid and intricate melodrama of transgalactic politics by A. E. van Vogt, which resembles Ruritania in five dimensions (and which has, quite possibly, the best curtain line in all imaginative fiction);

  —a powerful poetic prophecy by Ray Bradbury;

  —as good a sports-story-not-by-Bill-Gault as I’ve ever read, by Malcolm Jameson, who invents a new future sport for our excitement;

  —a quiet, convincing, Wells-like document by John Wyndham;

  —a Sturgeon novella which (like most Sturgeon stories) will not fit into the most offbeat of categorical descriptions;

  . . . Well, you take my meaning. Prophecy (though it is here, along with that other basic s.f. ingredient, satire) is not all. Science fiction is fiction, and the best of it is damned good fiction; I hope you’ll find that these samples prove my point.

  For suggestions, stimuli, and other aids to anthologizing, I wish particularly to thank Poul and Karen Anderson, John W. Campbell, Jr., Mildred Clingerman (chiefly just for existing), Kendell Foster Crossen, H. L. Gold, the late Henry Kuttner, J. Francis McComas, Judith Merril, Robert P. Mills, and most especially Walter I. Bradbury.

  ANTHONY BOUCHER

  Berkeley, California

  END NOTE

  [*] As indeed it occasionally has. Notice especially the manipulative miniature “hands” in Heinlein’s Waldo (1942). These now exist (for the ha
ndling of radioactive matter) and are known, properly and gratefully, as waldoes.

  RE-BIRTH

  by John Wyndham

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city—which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbor; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat . . .

  And the buildings were quite unlike any I knew. The traffic in the streets was strange, carts running with no horses to pull them; and sometimes there were things in the sky, shiny fish-shaped things that certainly were not birds.

  Most often I would see this wonderful place by daylight, but occasionally it was by night when the lights lay like strings of glowworms along the shore, and a few of them seemed to be sparks drifting on the water, or in the air.

  It was a beautiful, fascinating place, and once, when I was still young enough to know no better, I asked my eldest sister, Mary, where this lovely city could be.

  She shook her head, and told me that there was no such place—not now. But, perhaps, she suggested, I could somehow be dreaming about times long ago. Dreams were funny things, and there was no accounting for them; so it might be that what I was seeing was a bit of the world as it had been once upon a time—the wonderful world that the Old People had lived in; as it had been before God sent Tribulation.

  But after that she went on to warn me very seriously not to mention it to anyone else; other people, as far as she knew, did not have such pictures in their heads, either sleeping or waking, so it would be unwise to mention them.

  That was good advice, and luckily I had the sense to take it. People in our district had a very sharp eye for the odd, or the unusual, so that even my lefthandedness caused slight disapproval. So, at that time, and for some years afterward, I did not mention it to anyone—indeed, I almost forgot about it, for as I grew older the dream came less frequently, and then very rarely.

  But the advice stuck. Without it I might have mentioned the curious understanding I had with my cousin Rosalind, and that would certainly have led us both into very grave trouble—if anyone had happened to believe me. Neither I nor she, I think, paid much attention to it at that time; we simply had the habit of caution. I certainly did not feel unusual. I was a normal little boy, growing up in a normal way, taking the ways of the world about me for granted. And I kept on like that until the day I met Sophie. Even then, the difference was not immediate. It is hindsight that enables me to fix that as the day when the first small doubts started to germinate in my hitherto plain field of acceptance.

  That day I had gone off by myself, as I often did. I was, I suppose, nearly ten years old. My next sister, Sarah, was five years older, and the gap meant that I played a great deal alone. I had made my way down the cart track to the south, along the borders of several fields until I came to the high bank, and then along the top of the bank for quite a way.

  The bank was no puzzle to me then; in common with the rest of the landscape, it simply existed, it just was. It had no significance; it was far too big for me to think of as a thing that men could have built. It had never occurred to me to connect it with the wondrous doings of the Old People whom I sometimes heard about. It was simply the bank, coming round in a wide curve, and then running straight as an arrow toward the distant hills—just a part of the world, and no more to be wondered at than the river, the sky, or the hills themselves.

  I had often gone along the top of it, but seldom explored on the farther side. For some reason I regarded the country there as foreign—not so much inimical, as outside my territory. But there was a place I had discovered where the rain, in running down the far side of the bank, had worn a sandy gully. If one sat in the start of that and gave a good push off, one could go swishing down at a fine speed, and finally fly a few feet through the air to land in a pile of soft sand at the bottom.

  I must have been there half a dozen times before, and there had never been anyone about, but on this occasion, when I was picking myself up after my third descent, a voice said, “Hullo!”

  I looked around. At first I could not tell where it came from, then a shaking of the top twigs in a bunch of bushes caught my eye. While I was gazing at it the branches parted, and a face looked out at me. It was a small face, sunburned, and clustered about with dark curls. The expression was somewhat serious, but the eyes sparkled. We regarded one another for a moment, then:

  “Hallo,” I responded.

  She hesitated, then pushed the bushes further apart. I saw a girl a little shorter than I was, and perhaps a little younger. She wore reddish-brown dungarees with a yellow shirt. The cross stitched to the front of the dungarees was of a darker brown material. Her hair was tied on each side of her head with yellow ribbons. She stood still for a few seconds as though uncertain about leaving the security of the bushes, then curiosity got the better of her caution, and she stepped out.

  I stared at her because she was completely a stranger. From time to time there were gatherings or parties which brought together all the children for miles around, so that it was astonishing to encounter one that I had never seen before.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Sophie,” she told me. “What’s yours?”

  “David,” I said. “Where’s your home?”

  “Over there,” she said, waving her hand vaguely toward the foreign country beyond the bank.

  Her eyes left mine and went to the sandy runnel down which I had been sliding.

  “Is that fun?” she inquired, with a wistful look.

  I hesitated a moment before inviting her. “Yes,” I told her. “Come and try.”

  She hung back, studying me with a serious expression for a second or two, then made up her mind quite suddenly. She scrambled to the top of the bank ahead of me.

  She sped down the runnel with curls and ribbons flying. When I landed she had lost her serious look, and her eyes were dancing with excitement.

  “Again,” she said, and panted back up the bank.

  It was on her third descent that the misadventure occurred. She sat down and shoved off as before. I watched her swish down and come to a stop in a flurry of sand. Somehow she had contrived to land a couple of feet to the left of the usual place. I made ready to follow, and waited for her to get clear. She did not.

  “Go on,” I told her, impatiently.

  She tried to move, and then called up, “I can’t. It hurts.”

  I risked pushing off anyway, and landed close beside her.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Her face was screwed up. Tears stood in her eyes. “My foot’s stuck,” she said.

  Her left foot was buried. I scrabbled the soft sand clear with my hands. Her shoe was jammed in a narrow space between two up-pointed stones. I tried to move it, but it would not budge.

  “Can’t you sort of twist it out?” I suggested.

  She tried, lips valiantly compressed.

  “It won’t come.”

  “I’ll help pull,” I offered.

  “No, no! It hurts,” she protested.

  I did not know what to do next, but I was favorably impressed by her stoicism. All the other small girls I knew—and some of the boys, too—would have been yelling their heads off in the circumstances. Very clearly her predicament was painful. I considered the problem.

  “We’d better cut the laces so you can pull your foot out of the shoe. I can’t reach the knot,” I decided.

  “No!” she said, alarmedly. “No, I mustn’t.”

  She was so emphatic that I was baffled. If she would pull her foot out of the shoe, we might knock the shoe itself free with a stone, but if she would not, I did not see what was to be done. She lay back on the sand, the knee of the trapped leg sticking up in the air.

  “Oh, it is hurting so,” she said. She could not hold back the tears a
ny longer. They ran down her face. But even then she didn’t howl. She made small puppyish noises.

  “You’ll have to take it off,” I told hen

  “No!” she protested again. “No. I mustn’t. Not ever. I mustn’t.”

  Whatever the reason for it, there was no mistaking her intensity. I sat down beside her, at a loss. Both her hands held on to one of mine, gripping it tightly while she cried. It was obvious that the pain of her foot was increasing. For almost the first time in my life I found myself in charge of a situation which demanded a decision. I made it.

  “It’s no good. You’ve got to get it off,” I told her. “If you don’t, you’ll probably stay here and die.”

  She did not give in at once, but her argument weakened until at last she consented. She watched apprehensively while I cut the lace. Then she said:

  “Go away! You mustn’t look.”

  I hesitated, but childhood is a time thickly beset with incomprehensible, though important, conventions; I withdrew a few yards and turned my back. I heard her breathing hard. Then she was crying again. I turned around to help her.

  “I can’t do it,” she said, looking at me fearfully through her tears. I knelt down to see what I could do about it.

  “You mustn’t ever tell,” she said. “Never, never. Promise?”

  I promised.

  She was very brave about it. Nothing more than the puppy noises.

  When I did succeed in getting the foot free, it looked queer; I mean, it was all twisted and puffy—I didn’t even notice then that it had more than the usual number of toes . . .

  I managed to hammer the shoe out of the cleft, and handed it to her. But she found she could not put it on her swollen foot. Nor could she put the foot to the ground. I thought I might carry her on my back, but she was heavier than I expected, and it was clear that we should not get far that way.