Genre Science Fiction. Page - 5

r as she jumped up and down in rage and pointed a finger at him. "You get out of here, Melvin Hastings! You're not a nice boy at all!"Face red, he had hastily retreated as the teacher assured Alice and the rest of the girls that he had made a simple mistake. But how angry Alice had been! It was a week before she would speak to him. He smiled and sank back deeply into the pillow. He remembered how proud he had been when old Doc Collins, who came out to do the honors every Fall, had

'Do you suppose,' I asked suddenly, 'that anyone exists twice on the same earth? Reincarnation in the sense of the Hindus?'He laughed scornfully. 'The age of the earth is somewhere between a thousand million and three thousand million years. What proportion of eternity is that?' 'Why--no proportion at all. Zero.' 'Exactly. And zero represents the chance of the same atoms combining to form the same person twice in one cycle of a planet. But I have shown that trillions, or trillions of trillions

ut into deep water. Above it were store-houses, machine rooms, kitchens, all the paraphernalia of modern existence. He stepped out of a kiosk onto an upper deck, thirty feet above the surface. Nobody else was there and he walked over to the railing and leaned on it, looking across the water and savoring loneliness.Below him the tiers dropped away to the main deck, flowing lines and curves, broad sheets of clear plastic, animated signs, the grass and flowerbeds of a small park, people walking

t to his feet, dug out the bandanna and mopped at his face. He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It was the tracker."It's all right, Sipar," he said. "You can quit worrying. I got it. We can go home now." * * * * * It had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted. For the moment, the vua crop was safe. He tucked the bandanna back into his pocket, went down the

gave Tom a hug and greeted Bud warmly. Over the delicious dinner, the conversation turned to the mysterious thief missile."Who on earth could have fired it?" Sandy asked. Tom shrugged. "No telling--yet. There's more than one unfriendly country which would give a lot for the data picked up on our Jupiter shot." "You aren't expecting more trouble, are you?" Phyl put in uneasily. Tom passed the question off lightly in order not to alarm his mother and the two girls.

The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone in the observation bubble, ten thousand light-years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him.Of one thing he was already certain; he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The first bubble attendant had committed suicide and the second was a mindless maniac on

CHAPTER II. DRUMBEAT OF DEATH LUIZ WAS staring at Raft in surprise. "S'nhor?" Luiz said. "What?" Raft answered. "Did you speak?" "No." Raft let the lens fall back on da Fonseca's bare chest. Merriday was at his side. "The other man won't let me look at him," he said worriedly. "He's stubborn." "I'll talk to him," Raft said. He went out, trying not to think about that lens, that lovely, impossible face. Subjective, of course,

theories. What I saw through that ultramicroscope was not an unproven theory, but a fact. My theories you have brought out by your questions.""You are quite right," said the Doctor; "but you did mention yourself that you hoped to provide proof." The Chemist hesitated a moment, then made his decision. "I will tell you the rest," he said. "After the destruction of the microscope, I was quite at a loss how to proceed. I thought about the problem for many