| The Fairy Chessmen | Lewis Padgett (Kuttner / Moore) | The weirdest weapon ever conceived attacked not the mighty defensive screens, but the defending technical minds. It was a simple idea–but simply devastating. All it did was deny the basis of the scientific method! |
| Veiled Island | Emmett McDowell | A new author presents a tale of a new kind of superman, a cannibalistic, savage, dirty barbarian. But it isn’t what a race knows that counts; it’s what that race is. |
| Fine Feathers | George O. Smith | It’s an old, old, human urge to join the “get-rich-quick” boys. But with the educator machine that one man had invented, another man decided it was even better to join the “get-smart-quick” bandwagon. But as no man is ever quite rich enough, no man ever feels he’s quite smart enough–and both lead to trouble. |
| N Day | Philip Latham
(R.S. Richardson) | There have been many tales of the terror and riots that precede the end of the Earth, when some scientist accurately predicts its doom. But now let’s see–would men react quite that way… |
| A Matter of Length | Ross Rocklynne | “How long is a minute?” doesn’t ordinarily make much sense–but on that strange planet, a minute was the wrong length. The oxygen in the air was the wrong length, too–but they were the right length to take the measure of Joe Henderson’s deadly little problem! |
| The Plants | Murray Leinster | It should be axiomatic that the dominant life-form on any planet is a dangerous, powerful species–or it wouldn’t be dominant. But of course, no one will be much bothered by a pretty little flower, even if it is dominant– |
| Special Knowledge | A. Bertram Chandler | A good officer on a modern merchant marine ship has a great deal of highly specialized knowledge. But if that man somehow found himself an officer on a merchant spaceship, his special knowledge would seem pretty useless–ordinarily. But not that trip! |
| This is the House | Lawrence O’Donnell (C.L. Moore) | A house, it has been said, is a machine for living. The house they bought from its previous occupant had, very definitely, been made just that. But–not for human living! |
| The Fairy Chessmen | Lewis Padgett (Kuttner / Moore) | Concluding Padgett’s novel of a strange but very terrible sort of weapon–the concept that truth, like all other things, might be variable, and our most basic laws but one of many possible aspects. |
| Pattern for Conquest | George O. Smith | First of three parts. The Earth has been menaced by galactic conquerors before, in science-fiction. But not quite this way–and not with quite these results. For instance, consider: What is the purpose of war? How determine the winner? |
| We Kill People | Lewis Padgett (Kuttner / Moore) | It was quite a business, too… and it wasn’t anything you could prove murder. Murder, after all, is strictly a human affair; this was, on the contrary, an inhuman sort of business! |
| Lady Dog | A. Bertram Chandler | The more complex, sensitive, and responsive a machine becomes, the more closely it approaches a living organism. Fine — but what if the darned thing begins to believe it is a living organism…? |
| Depth | G. N. Howard | A new author presents a new picture of a ship of–not space, yet space for all that. But the space hundreds of miles within the Earth! |
| Adapter | Murray Leinster | The Ethical Equation were a curious sort of business. For instance, the only ethical thing to do might turn out to be insubordination! |
| Guest in the House | Frank Belknap Long | The guest wasn’t invited, but then, the house was really a guest–in the time era of the intruder. The guest’s great trouble was he didn’t know the difference between knowledge and mental agility– |
| A Logic Named Joe | Will F. Jenkins (Murray Leinster) | Joe was a machine, and Joe wanted to be helpful. Joe was immensely helpful. So horribly helpful he very nearly destroyed civilization with his accurate answers! |
| Pattern for Conquest | George O. Smith | Second of Three Parts. With the aid of the Little People, Earth had developed new and mighty powers–but Earth remained one planet, and one people, opposing a quarter of a galaxy. The end was foredoomed–but the meaning was not so clear! |
| Swamper | Jerry Shelton | The peasant type clings to old ways in the face of any new advance–and, in time, there will be the dull, unchanging peasant type even on other worlds. Like the Swamper– |
| Black Market | Raymond F. Jones | An O.P.A agent’s job is to stop black market operations–but the job that faced him was something no ordinary measure could handle. Targ advertised his Black Market Emporium–but not the source of his strange and wonderfully efficient goods! |
| Loophole | Arthur C. Clarke | The Martians knew when Man developed the atomic bomb–and they knew Man’s warring character. So they took steps to see that Man stayed on his own home planet. That was a serious error– |
| Memorial | Theodore Sturgeon | His plan was to create a crater than would warn all men to avoid atomic war for five thousand years to come, memorial that would spit lava and deadly rays for five millenniums. Part of his plan was fulfilled–the wrong part. |
| The Nightmare | Chan Davis | This is a story of the immediate tomorrow–and of civilization headed down the inescapable road to destruction–down the road that we have, already, selected–and its nightmare end. |
| Rescue Party | Arthur C. Clarke | The mission was to rescue a fraction of a population–because the Galactic Union hadn’t known that the Earth’s Sun had inhabited planets until too late. But they did know it was going Nova! |
| The Cure | Lewis Padgett (Kuttner / Moore) | The simplest way to drive a sane man mad is to face him with an absolutely insolvable dilemma. There are more complex ways, of course–but the cure gets complicated, too, and sometimes fails– |
| A Son Is Born | A. E. van Vogt | Van Vogt starts a new series, of a world where atomic energy is old–and science forgotten, debased to ritual. A world into which a child touched by atomic rays is born– |
| Alexander the Bait | William Tenn | A new author presents an ingenious new idea on how to get interplanetary travel started. It’s done with a Moon-radar system. But not quite as the world thought– |
| Placet is a Crazy Place | Frederic Brown | It wasn’t that Placet itself was so crazy; it was just that the things Placet’s gravitic situation did to human sensory organs was really remarkable. You could even solve impossible problems quite unintentionally– |
| Pattern for Conquest | George O. Smith | Conclusion. The true nature of conquest isn’t always easy to determine–as a completely overwhelmed and conquered Earth had to demonstrate. It’s so impractical to enslave a man brighter than you are– |
| Forecast | Raymond F. Jones | Even if you can control the weather–the weather won’t satisfy everyone. And if someone’s dissatisfied, that means a fight– |
| The Bottled Men | Ross Rocklynne | Two men–hunter and hunted–were trapped in that natural battle. One started digging his way out, but it was a trickier problem than he guessed– |
| The Chromium Helmet | Theodor Sturgeon | This isn’t the best of all possible worlds–but it was no help to five reasonably comfortable people to encounter the strange effects of the “cromium hemlet[sic].” |
| Paradise | Clifford D. Simak | The Mutants had solved the secret of the philosophy that would give men peace–but the man who returned from Jupiter offered Paradise with a price tag; the oblivion of mankind. |
| The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull | Anthony Boucher | Time travel might make murder easy–but time travel itself, even though accomplished, might not be any easy thing to bear– |
| Cold Front | Hal Clement | The Master Salesman’s job was to find out what the people of that new world wanted and needed, and how best to supply it. What they needed was easy; decent weather. But supplying it–even though Earth knew how to control weather–wasn’t so easy! |
| Trouble | George O. Smith | “It takes two to make a quarrel” doesn’t mean two different people, really–just two different viewpoints! |
| The Blindness | Philip Latham
(R.S. Richardson) | If, by some miracle, the full light of the Day Star could shine on man and his works– |
| Rain Check | Lewis Padgett (Kuttner / Moore) | It wasn’t human, or even remotely human. The race that created it had given it great powers. But one power it desperately wanted was denied it– |
| Stability | A. Bertram Chandler | Balance is important in modern planes–but a serious misbalance in something trying to balance on a jet of flaming gas could be more than merely annoying! |
| Film Library | A. E. van Vogt | Their novelty films were remarkable–but no novelties. Not, that is, at the time they were filmed– |
| Slaves of the Lamp | Arthur Leo Zagot | If greed were the only feature of human psychology men had to fear, we might cure the problem. But sometimes even worse is a man’s determination to improve his fellow man… |
| The Last Objective | Paul Carter | The only way to avoid atomic bombs is to be where they ain’t–and for an army, that meant tunneling underground in a really all-out way! |
| Bankruptcy Proceedings | E. Mayne Hull | Artur Blord had been in trouble–of his own doing–before. He knew how to protect himself against enemies. But it was his friends who were really dangerous! |
| Child of the Gods | A. E. van Vogt | In a world of war, assassination, and violence there seemed no place for the psychopathically shy and timid Clane. He could never appear in public, or rule as was his right–it seemed. |
| The Cat and the King | Raymond F. Jones | A cat can, of course, look. But this was a remarkable cat: it didn’t look. It watched. There’s a rather important difference– |
| The Toymaker | Raymond F. Jones | The Imaginos were silly, lumpy little dolls–but the kids were crazy about them. In fact–they were so crazy about them that the destiny of the planet hung on them! |
| Vintage Season | Lawrence O’Donnell
(C.L. Moore) | Everybody seemed to want the old house during May–and seemed willing to pay fantastic prices for the privilege. Strange tourists they were, too. The Cafe Society of another time. |
| Blind Time | George O. Smith | The real problem of the missing link–missing because displaced a few hours in time–was how to prevent an accident that had already happened! |
| Evidence | Isaac Asimov | You know, it would be mighty hard to get evidence that a robot claiming it was a man, was not. As a man, he’d have rights of privacy, and until you proved otherwise– |
| Slaves of the Lamp | Arthur Leo Zagot | Sometimes the finest motives are the deadliest, the kindliest acts, the stupidest–and an idealist can kill a city! |
| The Chronicler | A. E. van Vogt | There was a third eye in his skull–but it was more than a third path for vision. It was the key to a new, and terror-ridden world. A world of savages in a city, and philosophers in caves–and of a spaceship. First of two parts. |
| Chaos, Co-Ordinated | John MacDougal
(James Blish, R.W. Lowndes) | Earth didn’t stand much chance of winning against a galaxy, when the multitude of races was co-ordinated by a perfect thinking machine/ But machines have their limitations. No imagination–no soul, no poetry in ’em! |
| Assumption Unjustified | Hal Clement | It was an easy error to make. To an alien being, a man is a man is a human being. Even human beings have trouble, sometimes, telling one man from another. The alien’s assumption– |
| False Dawn | A. Bertram Chandler | A tale of very long ago, before man had descended (sic) from the “apes,” and a time when the Moon was not an airless, scarred glove in the night skies. |
| Alien | George O. Smith | This is not a logical, probably, or scientific story. It’s a bit of insanity about a barroom brawl over a man with feathers where his hair should have been– |
| To Still the Drums | Chan Davis | Some men ask only peace, and a chance to do their work; to some, a mighty weapon is an irresistible temptation to power, with or without the consent of a nation. And such must be watched. |
| Mewhu’s Jet | Theodore Sturgeon | Mewhu came from–somewhere. He wrecked his spaceship on landing, but the “parachute” he had was something decidedly super–an atomic jet job! The problem was to get into communication–they thought. |
| Hobbies | Clifford D. Simak | The cities were deserted, save for one. The men and women of that city had hobbies–but no accomplishments. The robots they had left behind were doing better… |
| The Unforeseen | Mark Champion | A prison break is successful only when it employs some factor which neither foresight nor past experience has called to the attention of the guards. They key to freedom is–the unforeseen. |
| Tower of Darkness | A. Bertram Chandler | The planet was a deadly place–deadly not to men, but to their ambition. It seemed to be cursed by the Tower, and against the Tower neither strong will, courage, not the flame of human ambition succeeded. It took something quite different–and unanswerable. |
| The Chronicler | A. E. van Vogt | Concluding the story of a man thrown into a strange world of highly civilized barbarians, and a decaying city– |
| Metamorphosite | Eric Frank Russell | Building a galactic empire takes time–a very long time. And it may not be the same people who started the job when they finish– |
| For the Public | Bernard I. Kahn | The story of a doctor of the Lunar Quarantine Station and his routine job. And the routine was death– |
| Hand of the Gods | A. E. van Vogt | Clane, the Child of the Gods, might be loved by the Atom Gods, but not by the sharp-minded old woman who ruled the Empire–and that was a very practical and dangerous matter indeed! |
| The Impossible Pirate | George O. Smith | Precisely so–impossible. Which was what made it so hard to catch him! There wasn’t any possible way he could escape– |
| Time Enough | Lewis Padgett (Kuttner / Moore) | The Old ‘Uns lived in secret–not quite immortal, but for five hundred years or more they’d lived. But nevertheless they’d all died at about one century! |
