The First Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  UNKNOWN THINGS, by Reginald Bretnor

  CAPTIVES OF THE FLAME, by Samuel R. Delany

  EXPEDITER, by Mack Reynolds

  ONE-SHOT, by James Blish

  SHIPWRECK IN THE SKY, by Eando Binder

  ZEN, by Jerome Bixby

  LANCELOT BIGGS COOKS A PIRATE, by Nelson Bond

  SENTIMENT, INC., by Poul Anderson

  THE ISSAHAR ARTIFACTS, by J. F. Bone

  THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP, by Ben Bova

  YEAR OF THE BIG THAW, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  EARTHMEN BEARING GIFTS, by Fredric Brown

  HAPPY ENDING, by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds

  LIGHTER THAN YOU THINK, by Nelson Bond

  RIYA’S FOUNDLING, by Algis Budrys

  ACCIDENTAL DEATH, by Peter Baily

  AND ALL THE EARTH A GRAVE, by C. C. MacApp

  DEAD RINGER, by Lester del Rey

  THE CRYSTAL CRYPT, by Philip K. Dick

  THE JUPITER WEAPON, by Charles L. Fontenay

  THE MAN WHO HATED MARS, by Randall Garrett

  NAVY DAY, by Harry Harrison

  THE JUDAS VALLEY, by Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett

  NATIVE SON, by T. D. Hamm

  JUBILEE, by Richard A. Lupoff

  FINAL CALL, by John Gregory Betancourt

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The First Science Fiction Megapack is copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. It is a revised edition of The Science Fiction Megapack (2011) and changes a few stories. For publication history of specific stories, see the Acknowledgments section at the end of this volume.

  For more information, contact the publisher through wildsidepress.com or the Wildside Press Forums. For publication information on individual stories, see the Acknowledgments page at the end of this volume.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  ATTN: KINDLE READERS

  The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your version or ebook reader.)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone (and email a revised copy to you when it’s updated, in either epub or Kindle format, if you provide contact information). You can email the publisher at [email protected].

  * * * *

  THE MEGAPACK SERIES

  The Adventure Megapack

  The Boys’ Adventure Megapack

  The Christmas Megapack

  The Second Christmas Megapack

  The Classic American Short Story Megapack

  The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

  The Cowboy Megapack

  The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

  The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

  The Father Brown Megapack

  The Ghost Story Megapack

  The Second Ghost Story Megapack

  The Horror Megapack

  The Macabre Megapack

  The Martian Megapack

  The Military Megapack

  The Mummy Megapack

  The Mystery Megapack

  The Penny Parker Megapack

  The Pulp Fiction Megapack

  The Rover Boys Megapack

  The Science Fiction Megapack

  The Second Science Fiction Megapack

  The Third Science Fiction Megapack

  The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Penny Parker Megapack

  The Pinocchio Megapack

  The Steampunk Megapack

  The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

  The Tom Swift Megapack

  The Vampire Megapack

  The Victorian Mystery Megapack

  The Werewolf Megapack

  The Western Megapack

  The Second Western Megapack

  The Second Western Megapack

  The Wizard of Oz Megapack

  The Wizard of Oz Megapack

  AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

  The E.F. Benson Megapack

  The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

  The B.M. Bower Megapack

  The Wilkie Collins Megapack

  The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

  The Randall Garrett Megapack

  The G.A. Henty Megapack

  The Andre Norton Megapack

  The H. Beam Piper Megapack

  The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

  UNKNOWN THINGS, by Reginald Bretnor

  I have met any number of collectors during my thirty years in the antique trade: greedy ones (though, of course, they’re all greedy one way or another), and some with superb taste and a deep understanding of their fields, some with book knowledge and no taste at all, others who collect status symbols or security blanks, rare people with whom it is a joy to converse and many more utter bores, and others still so unbelievably eccentric that they defy classification. But Andreas Hoogstraten was the strangest of them all. Always polite, almost always smiling, he still seemed to carry with him that eerie coldness you find in haunted houses. Neither his obvious wealth nor his perfect tailoring, neither his patrician nose, sleek blond hair, and thick, impossibly yellow eyebrows, nor a voice as soft and gentle as a wooing dove’s could conceal it, at least from me.

  I met him first in a Glastonbury pub. Every year, I’d go to England, buy an ancient van, and spend two months at least driving around and about, through Scotland and back down to Wales and Cornwall, buying big antiques and filling them with little antiques, then for the last third of my time crossing over to the continent and doing the same thing in France and the Low Countries. When the van was full, I’d ship it back as deckload on a freighter—this was in the days when you could do that—and drive it home to Saybrook from wherever it landed. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

  The Glastonbury pub was called the Weeping Nun—after some local ghost story—with an eighteenth-century sign that showed its dismal subject against a background of ancient tombstones and a silver moon—but inside it was the essence of English country hospitality, with all the dark wood and pewter and hunting prints you might expect, a great fireplace fit for roasting haunches of beef but cold now in the summertime, and neither a jukebox
nor a telly to ruin the atmosphere. I went there with a local dealer, Tod Bardsley, with whom I had done business for several years, and we were just about to have lunch when Hoogstraten came in. He waved. He strode over to our table, carrying his cold aura with him.

  “Mr. Bardsley, they said you’d be here, but I see you’re with a friend?” Bardsley nudged my foot under the table. He moved over. “Ah, do sit down, Mr. Hoogstraten,” he invited. “Charles here won’t mind. He’s a fellow dealer,” he chuckled, “always happy to meet another customer, like all of us.”

  We were introduced. I shook Hoogstraten’s tense, cold hand. I was, I said, pleased to meet him. I was indeed a dealer, but I was a long way from home. Briefly, Bardsley told him about my yearly trips, while the girl brought us two half-and-halfs and took his order for a whiskey and soda.

  “You really must get around,” he commented, looking at me intently. “I imagine you see a far greater variety of things than the average dealer, don’t you?”

  “Rather!” Bardsley laughed. “There’s not a shop from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s Charlie’s not been in, to say nothing of across Channel. I daresay he’s probably seen a thing or two that’d strike your fancy.”

  “What do you collect,” I asked.

  He turned his head, and I found myself looking directly into his lashless eyes. They were almost a matte blue, reminding me of Wedgewood Parian ware, and they looked dry, as though they’d never known tears.

  “What do I collect?” he said. “As our friend here will tell you, I buy anything I do not understand. I do not mean the expert’s understanding of antiques and works of art. If I do not know what a thing is, if I cannot imagine what it was made for, it intrigues me, and if it’s for sale I buy it. You see, if I do not know, and if nobody can tell me, it makes me determined to find out, to solve the problem. Where is your shop?”

  “In Saybrook, in Connecticut.”

  “Well, that’s certainly near enough to me. My apartment’s in New York.”

  We exchanged cards, and he said he’d take a run up one of these days and have a look around and made me promise to keep my eyes peeled for any of his mysterious objects. He was, he told me, on his way to Istanbul and the Near East generally, and perhaps to Nepal and, now that the Chinese were letting down the barriers, to Tibet.

  Shortly after our lunch arrived, he rose to go, saying he’d see Bardsley later at the shop, and once more he made me promise to look out for him. He left, and I asked Tod about him.

  “He’s a rum one, Charlie. Buys anything if you can’t tell him what it is, and pays well too. Last time in my place, he saw a weird cast-iron tool with a lot of cogs and a twisty handle that somehow didn’t seem to connect with anything. He peered at it and peered at it, and finally took it with him looking like the cat fresh from the cream jug. A year or so back, too, I found him a painting—a dark thing like something seventeenth-century Dutch—but not like any you ever saw. The more you tried to make out what the subject was, the odder it looked. But it was done by a real artist, you could tell that. He paid me seven hundred without a quiver. And the real beauty of it is, he buys things that otherwise you’d have on hand forever—so what if he is strange looking, with those crazy eyebrows and blue-blue eyes?”

  I told him then about the coldness, but he said the man had never affected him that way, so I put the thought aside as a quirk of my own.

  Now I know that it was not.

  Actually, Hoogstraten never did take the trouble to come up to Saybrook and visit my shop, and for three or four months I almost forgot about him. Then, at a flea market, I found a gadget I couldn’t make head or tail of—one which ordinarily I’d have passed by without a second look. It was beautifully made of brass and polished steel, and its fitted mahogany box clearly went back to the last decade of the nineteenth century. Cased with it were eight or ten brass wheels, the rim of each serrated with geometrical neatness and with its individual pattern. It had a central axis to which these might have been affixed, a plunger like a date-stamp’s, a spirit level, and two calibrated dials the purpose of which I couldn’t even guess at. The man who had it thought it might have been a check-writing device, but he couldn’t tell me how it possibly could have worked.

  I bought the thing for less than twenty dollars, and that night I phoned Hoogstraten and was pleased to find him back from his journeyings. I described it to him, and instantly his voice came alive with interest. No, he couldn’t possibly come up to Saybrook, not then, but would I bring it to New York?

  I hesitated, for it seemed like quite an expedition for what I assumed would be a pretty petty deal, and at once he answered my unspoken question. “You needn’t worry about the money part, Mr. Dennison—it is Dennison, isn’t it? I am accustomed to paying well for anything that meets my criteria—at least in three figures—unless, of course, the seller has already set a lower price. In this case, even if I do not buy it, I’ll make the trip worth your while.”

  So I agreed to bring it to him on the Sunday, and he gave me an address near Sutton Place—his card had carried only his phone number. The cab dropped me off at two in the afternoon in front of a several-story, obviously very expensively converted brownstone, with a martial doorman mounting guard at the entrance. I waited humbly while he made his phone call, and saw that there was only a single flat on each floor.

  “Mr. Hoogstraten is waiting for you,” he told me finally, giving my shoes and sports coat a supercilious farewell appraisal. “Take the elevator to the third floor.”

  The elevator was smooth and swift and new, and I was whisked to my destination in an instant. There a man-servant was waiting for me—I won’t say a butler. He was short and muscular and massive, with a pale square face and huge hands. I judged him to be some sort of general factotum—chauffeur perhaps? Guard? He looked more like a hit-man. But he was polite enough, bowing me through the hall and opening the door for me.

  I don’t know exactly what I had expected, but it was not the Museum of Modern Art decor that greeted me, spare and stark and rectilinear, self-consciously manipulating mass and light and shadow in grays and blacks, startling whites, intrusive yellows, solid reds, some of the furniture echoing it, some tortured, twisted, with a thin scattering of anomalous ornaments. Of the objects he collected, there was no sign.

  My face, I know, must have mirrored my astonishment, but he did not notice. He had eyes only for the package I was carrying, and I saw how hard his small black pupils were in their Wedgwood settings. He did not ask me to sit down. Dressed like something from a Vanity Fair men’s fashions ad, he seized it without a word, opened it. His lips now drawn back from his almost too even teeth, he plucked the gadget from its box, hastily put the box down on a table, seated himself. For several minutes, he examined it, testing this, trying that, while I stood there uncomfortably.

  Finally, “What do you suppose it is?” he asked.

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” I answered. “The man I bought it from thought it might have been intended as some sort of check protector.”

  He said that was nonsense, and went back to his examination for several more long, silent minutes.

  Then he looked up at me. He smiled, and again I felt wrapped in coldness. “It is satisfactory,” he told me. “Yes, it is completely satisfactory. I shall derive pleasure from it.” He nodded. “Indeed yes. Will five hundred be adequate?”

  “You are very generous,” I said, accepting the five hundred-dollar bills.

  And at that point, a door opened and a woman entered. The effect was unbelievable. She paused, regarding us—and suddenly, as far as I was concerned, no one else was in the room. Her presence dominated it. She was tall, her hair coal black, as were her eyes. Her cheekbones were high. But the physical details were nothing compared with the totality. Suddenly I knew why men had imagined goddesses, and sacrificed to them, why there had been tiltin
g in the lists and knightly quests, why late Victorian artists like Burne-Jones had so idealized the beauty of womankind. And simultaneously there was another surge, one I still felt when I remember her, that very natural one that sets your loins afire.

  She turned toward us, and against all reason I was quite sure that she did not walk, but flowed, floated. Nor was she gowned for any such effect. She was dressed simply, in a tailored suit with white lace at the throat, and almost no jewelry; a brooch, a wedding ring.

  Hoogstraten looked up, frowning slightly. “You’re going out?” he asked.

  “Yes, dear,” she answered—and at the word irrational jealousy flamed in me. “Only for a—how do you say it?—for an hour or two perhaps? You do not need me here?”

  She had the strangest accent I’ve ever heard, one I was quite unable to identify. All I can say is that somehow, to my ear, it sounded archaic. He didn’t even answer, his attention once more on the thing I’d sold him.

  “Good-bye,” she said, smiled very slightly at me, and left.

  I had to interrupt him. “Mrs. Hoogstraten?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes,” he replied, a hint of irritation in his voice. “Pretty, isn’t she?” She’s magnificent! I thought. But I had sense enough not to say it. It took him a moment more to remember I was there, but with a sigh he put the object down again. “Thank you, Dennison,” he said. “You will call me if you find anything else, won’t you? Yes, yes. Now Varig will show you out.”

  He must have pressed a button, because immediately the servant was at the door. Hoogstraten did not say good-bye.