The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series

  SOME LIKE IT COLD

  TREE, SPARE THAT WOODMAN

  BLUNDER ENLIGHTENING

  WASTE NOT, WANT

  HIGH SIGN

  UNIFORM OF A MAN

  JOURNEY WORK

  “LEST YE BE JUDGED…”

  SELLER OF THE SKY

  SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS

  FACTS OF LIFE

  PREFERRED POSITION

  SIGN OF LIFE

  THE PRICE

  MAN

  THE OLD-FASHIONED SPACEMAN

  BRIDGE CROSSING

  THE SIGN OF HOMO SAP

  TOO DENSE TO DIE

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Ninth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: Dave Dryfoos is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  The MEGAPACK™ ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Dave Dryfoos (1915-2003) is hardly a household word among science fiction readers anymore, but in the early to mid 1950s, he produced a steady stream of frothy SF stories for the likes of Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, and others. This volume assembles 19 of his classic tales.

  Enjoy!

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ABOUT THE SERIES

  Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK™ ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The MEGAPACK™ ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

  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™ ebook 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. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

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  SOME LIKE IT COLD

  This Dyt was a likeable kid, see. I didn’t want to carry out no sentence of banishment on him. You take a guy to the Outer Edges, and sooner or later he goes over—and out of existence.

  So it was tough, because he’d broken the law all right, as far as I could tell. Harming Rational Critters—that’s Section 509.1. Banishment is the penalty. And I was the cop would have to enforce it, if the Judge said to.

  Dyt’s Old Man was the one got him
into this mess. Claimed there was a possibility of life—rational life—in some of the Visual Systems.

  I guess you know that a Visual System is a bunch of stars that gives off light-waves—rays like our Sun’s radioshine, only longer. It don’t sound very reasonable there’d be rational life in a light-system, so it’s no wonder Dyt’s Old Man got hooted at. I mean, look, they said in court that the wave-length of a star’s radiation is more or less related to its temperature. So if a star gives off mostly visible light, instead of microwaves like our Sun does, you’d think it’d be all wrong for life.

  Even if there was life of some kind or other, folks said it couldn’t be rational. Matter itself must be different in that kind of a System. Time would be different. So any life down there must be awfully different from us, they said. And if it differs from us, how could it be rational? People shouted the Old Man down.

  But this kid Dyt wasn’t going to stand for his Old Man being a laughing-stock, so he went after the facts.

  His father wasn’t anxious for him to go, but finally doped out the most likely coordinates, and sent him off. Dyt went by adaptation—became a comet, like.

  So all right, he gets there to this planet his father told him to look for. It was so small he almost cracked into it—denser than anything he’d ever imagined. And when he got there, he didn’t know what he was looking for.

  He was a kid, you understand. Impetuous.

  There was a visual star by way of Sun, all right, just like the Old Man told him. It was small, and rotating fast.

  Around it was something under a dozen planets, some with satellites going around them, and there was a mess of smaller stuff, too.

  And it was all dominated by visual light. You can’t imagine what that does—I can’t, anyhow. Time, for instance. Why, if you lived on this planet he visited—they call it Earth—every single time your little planet rolled over, it would be a day. And every time your little planet ran around its star, that would count for a year.

  This Dyt was just a kid, like I said. But on our cosmic time-scale, where it’s a year every time our Sun goes once around the Galactic Center, why, every one of our years is a couple hundred million times as long as one of Earth’s, so Dyt was maybe as old as the planet itself.

  Now, how would you make contact with the men of a planet that much different from what we’re used to? I sure wouldn’t know. And neither did Dyt.

  Compared to that unbelievably dense planet he was just a soft cloud, so he kind of enveloped it and rested in its gravitational field.

  He was looking, he told me, for men. I asked him once, I said, “Dyt, if we’re men, and those people are so different from us, how come they’re men, too?”