The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories! Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  INTERVIEW: ROBERT J. SAWYER

  SARGASSO OF LOST STARSHIPS, by Poul Anderson

  THE DAY IS DONE, by Lester del Rey

  X MARKS THE PEDWALK, by Fritz Leiber

  RAFT, by Larry Tritten

  SPACEMAN ON A SPREE, by Mack Reynolds

  THE MASKED WORLD, by Jack Williamson

  THE GOD-PLLLNK, by Jerome Bixby

  A GUEST OF GANYMEDE, by C. C. MacApp

  WALLFLOWER, by Thomas A. Easton

  THE GIRL IN HIS MIND, by Robert F. Young

  TO SAVE EARTH, by Edward W. Ludwig

  THE HERMIT OF MARS, by Stephen Bartholomew

  A MATTER OF MONSTERS, by Manly Banister

  WHEN YOU GIFFLE..., by L.J. Stecher

  THE NIGHT OF THE TROLLS, by Keith Laumer

  DANGLING CONVERSATIONS, by Edward M. Lerner

  GUARDSMEN, FED TO TIGERS, by A.R. Morlan

  THE FOREVER FOREST, by Rhys Hughes

  DISCOVERY TIME, by Frank Belknap Long

  A HITCH IN SPACE, by Fritz Leiber

  TO THIS THEIR LATE ESCAPE, by Jay Lake

  STEAK TARTARE AND THE CATS OF GARI BABAKIN STATION, by Mary A. Turzillo

  VITAL INGREDIENT, by Charles V. De Vet

  JAMES P. CROW, by Philip K. Dick

  COMMON DENOMINATOR, by John D. MacDonald

  HUMAN SPIRIT, BEETLE SPIRIT, by John Gregory Betancourt

  The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved. Cover art © Fargon / Fotolia.

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

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  “Interview: Robert J. Sawyer” is copyright © 2007 by Darrell Schweitzer.

  “Sargasso of Lost Starships,” by Poul Anderson, was originally published in Planet Stories, January 1952.

  “The Day Is Done,” by Lester del Rey, was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1939. Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith, copyright renewed in 1967 by Conde Nast. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Lester del Rey.

  “X Marks The Pedwalk,” by Fritz Leiber, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963.

  “Raft,” by Larry Tritten,” was originally published in Darker Matter. Copyright © 2007 by Larry Tritten. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Larry Tritten.

  “Spaceman on a Spree,” by Mack Reynolds, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1963. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Mack Reynolds.

  “The Masked World,” by Jack Williamson, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963.

  “The God-Plllnk,” by Jerome Bixby, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963.

  “A Guest of Ganymede,” by C. C. MacApp, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1963.

  “Wallflower,” by Thomas A. Easton, was originally published in Tomorrow, November 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Thomas A Easton. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Girl in His Mind,” by Robert F. Young, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963.

  “To Save Earth,” by Edward W. Ludwig, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963.

  “The Hermit of Mars,” by Stephen Bartholomew, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963.

  “A Matter of Monsters,” by Manly Banister, was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1954. Copyright © 1954 by Street & Smith, copyright renewed in 1982 by Davis Publications. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Manly Banister.

  “When You Giffle...,” by L.J. Stecher, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963.

  “The Night of the Trolls,” by Keith Laumer, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963.

  “Dangling Conversations,” by Edward M. Lerner, was originally published in Analog, November 2000. . Copyright © 2000 by Edward M. Lerner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Guardsmen, Fed to Tigers,” by A.R. Morlan, was originally published in LC-39 #3. Copyright © 2000 by A.R. Morlan. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

  “The Forever Forest,” by Rhys Hughes, was originally published in The Company He Keeps (Postscripts 22/23). Copyright © 2010 by Rhys Hughes. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Discovery Time,” by Frank Belknap Long, was originally published in Crypt of Cthulhu #31. Copyright © 1985 by Frank Belknap Long. Reprinted with the kind permission and assistance of Lily Doty, Mansfield M. Doty, and the family of Frank Belknap Long.

  “A Hitch In Space,” by Fritz Leiber, was originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, August 1963.

  “To This Their Late Escape,” by Jay Lake, was originally published in The Sky That Wraps. Copyright © 2010 by Joseph E. Lake. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin Station,” by Mary A. Turzillo, was originally published in Analog, April 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Mary A. Turzillo. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Vital Ingredient,” by Charles V. De Vet, was originally published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, July 1952.

  “James P. Crow,” by Philip K. Dick, was originally appeared in Planet Stories, May 1954.

  “Common Denominator,” by John D. MacDonald, was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951.

  “Human Spirit, Beetle Spirit,” by John Gregory Betancourt, was originally published in Quest to Riverworld. Copyright © 2002 by John Gregory Betancourt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Welcome to The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®—another mammoth selection of great modern and classic science fiction stories—26 in all—plus an interview with Robert J. Sawyer.

  One of the pleasures of putting together MEGAPACK®s is working with the authors. Years ago, when ebooks were just beginning to make their mark, Wildside Press published much of Thomas A. Easton’s backlist through a service called Fictionwise (which is, alas, no more). Eventually we went our separate ways, and decades passed. (I said it was a long time ago!) I ended up contacting Tom, and one thing led to another, and suddenly Wildside is again his ebook publisher...with not one, but two mammoth collections of his novels and stories available, Thomas A. Easton’s The Love Songs and UFOs MEGAPACK® and Thomas A. Easton’s The Love Songs and UFOs MEGAPACK® and Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®. Of course, I had to talk him into a story for The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®, too!

  Last issue, I included the first story I wrote in Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld, “The Merry Men of the Riverworld” (originally published in Tales of Riverworld.) Everyone seemed to enjoy first story, because I was asked to contribute to the second volume, Quest to Riverworld, which I happily accepted. I include that one here, “Human Spirit, Beetle Spirit.” It was an attempt to do something original within the Riverworld universe framework, and I think it succeeds. I hope you enjoy it.

  Looking ahead to the next volume (which, hopefully, will be out in a
month if all goes well), not only will we have a lot of great short stories, but we’ll start serializing another novel. Fun stuff.

  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, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee 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://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (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.

  INTERVIEW: ROBERT J. SAWYER

  Conducted by Darrell Schweitzer

  Q: So, what’s your background? What brought you to the SF field?

  Sawyer: Well, skipping over all that boring stuff between the Big Bang and April 1960, I was born in Ottawa, Canada’s Capital city. My father was an economist, and shortly after I was born he was offered a teaching appointment at the University of Toronto, so we moved there, and Toronto, or environs, has been my home ever since.

  I was first introduced to science fiction through kid’s TV shows, most notably Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5, which started airing in Canada in 1963, when I was three; I still consider the music played over the closing credits of that series—“I Wish I Was a Spaceman”—to be my personal theme song.

  When I was twelve, my older brother and my dad noted what I was watching on TV, and they got me some science-fiction books: Trouble on Titan, a YA novel by Alan E. Nourse; The Rest of the Robots, Asimov’s second robot collection; and David Gerrold’s first novel, Space Skimmer. I’m still enormously fond of all three, and am thrilled to now be friends with David. In fact, we collaborated on editing an essay collection entitled Boarding the Enterprise last year in honor of the fortieth anniversary of classic Star Trek, which, as anyone who has read my books knows, was also a big influence on me.

  Indeed, with all due respect to those book authors, I’ve got to say that it was media science fiction—the original Star Trek, the original Planet of the Apes, and, to a lesser degree, the original Twilight Zone—that really opened my eyes to SF as a vehicle for social comment, for looking at the here and now.

  Fast-forwarding: I knew from very early on that I wanted to write science fiction, and I’d been captivated by Gene Roddenberry and Stephen E. Whitfield’s book The Making of Star Trek. So after high school I did a degree in Radio and Television Arts at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Ironically, in doing courses in English literature there, I discovered that print, not film or TV, was were I really wanted to be.

  I made a living after I graduated in 1982 for the next decade mostly doing nonfiction writing, plus the odd SF story on the side. I somewhat precipitously became a full-time SF writer in 1990, when my first novel, Golden Fleece, came out.

  For the record, anyone who says major awards have no financial value is full of beans—I made more money off of science fiction in the six months following winning the Best Novel Nebula Award in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment than I’d made in the six years preceding that. John Douglas, one of my editors on that book, put it just right the day after I won the Nebula, I think: “Overnight, you’ve gone from being a promising beginner to an established, bankable name.” I’ve made a comfortable living ever since, and now have seventeen novels under my belt.

  Q: What difference does it make, in terms of writing SF, that you are a Canadian? Sure, it probably means you get more local media coverage, but I note that all those books and TV shows you cite (except for Fireball XL5) were American. Do you think that a Canadian perspective produces a different kind of SF? Did you find it necessary to learn to “fake American” in order to sell to American markets? Did anybody try to pressure you to do this?

  Sawyer: Honestly, the difference it makes is principally financial. I make about double what I’d be making if I lived in the States. First, science fiction actually is quite popular in Canada, and people aren’t such genre snobs here—plus they like to buy Canadian. That means, even though the population is only one-tenth as big, I sell as many copies in Canada as I do in the States, and that makes me a national mainstream bestseller here, and that directly translates into money in my pocket.

  Being a big fish in a small pond has other advantages: I’ve got a lucrative sideline going as a keynote speaker at conferences up here, doing about one major gig a month. And there’s a long list of paid library residencies and so forth; as we do this interview, I’m sitting rent-free in Canada’s north, being paid a stipend of $2,000 a month to write a book that I’m already being paid by the publisher to write. And although the really big bucks are doubtless in Hollywood movies, the Canadian film industry is significant, and options tons of properties. Right now, I’ve got film rights to ten of my novels under option, nine of which are to Canadian producers.

  As it happens, I’m a dual US-Canadian citizen—my mother is an American who was temporarily in Canada when I was born—and someone asked me recently if I’d ever thought of moving to the States. The implication was that, like actors leaving Toronto to try their luck in L.A., that that should be my next move. But he had it backwards, and I had to say to him, “Sorry, I couldn’t afford the cut in pay.”

  Now, what about the impact on the words I write? Well, being a Canadian resident hugely affects my perspective. Canada is a middle power, a nation of peacekeepers, and a country that looks for compromise. There’s no doubt that my politics are liberal by American standards, and that my heroes are much more pacifistic than most Americans would write. The most often quoted remark from all my books is something an alien said in Calculating God: “Honor does not have to be defended.” To a Canadian that seems right: honor is something you have, it can’t be taken away by anyone; to a lot of Americans, though, that line seems nonsensical.

  Anyone familiar with both Canada and the United States is aware that I criticize both countries—hell, the Government of Ontario gets ripped a new one in Calculating God. But some of the commentary on Canada goes unnoticed by some American readers, because they don’t get the references, and so they think I’m only taking swipes at the US government, and they get testy about that.

  But I make no apologies. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980, and Jimmy Carter reactivated Selective Service, I could have said screw that, I’m in Canada, but I went and registered for the draft, and to this day I file a tax return with the IRS. I’m an American citizen and criticizing both the countries I love is not just my birthright, it is, I honestly believe, my patriotic duty—God love the Dixie Chicks! And, yes, just like them, I do love the United States: I don’t think anyone who has read the speech by the American president that appears in segments at the beginning of each chapter in my
Hybrids could think otherwise. Right after 9/11, we put an American flag on our car in solidarity; it’s still there and it’s the only flag on our car.

  And, sure, lots of Canadians told me to Americanize my books if I wanted to sell them to publishers in the Big Apple; they kept saying that Americans wouldn’t get what I was saying. But I refused to believe that Americans were that provincial, if you’ll forgive the pun. I’ve had books published by Warner, HarperCollins USA, Ace, and Tor, and never once have any of them ever asked me to tone down the Canadian content on my books. And why should they? Americans love Canada, and Canadians, honest to God, love Americans.

  Q: So, do you get your ideas from the secret P.O. Box in Schenectady that American writers use, or another one somewhere in Canada?

  But, more seriously, I should think that an important difference between Canadian and American SF (and writing in general) is that may topics which are controversial in the USA are not in Canada. I doubt Evolution is a big deal in Canada, whereas in the US school system it’s almost a taboo. I can see two ways this could affect things. First, it could mean that you have more freedom writing in Canada. Or it could mean that in order to make satirical or controversial points in the US, you might seem to the Canadians to be belaboring the obvious. Any sense of this? I imagine we have more flat-earthers in the US too. Or do I have a greener-pastures view of Canada?

  Sawyer: No, no, there’s no doubt that intellectually, these days, the pastures are greener in Canada. Our prime minister is only a moron; your president is an idiot...[laughs]. Seriously, of course there’s a reactionary right wing here in Canada, and religious fundamentalists, too, but they don’t hold much political sway, to which I’ll say, advisedly, thank God.

  But one very valid reading of my Neanderthal trilogy is that the Neanderthal culture I portray is emblematic of Canadian ideals: full acceptance of alternative lifestyles including the whole GLBT gamut and polygamy, plus secularism, pacifism, and environmentalism, topped off with the willingness to give up personal liberty for the common good (for the actual common good, not trumped-up threats). It’s significant that many American critics have termed the portrayed world utopian. It isn’t—it’s not no-place; it’s that big honking land you get to if you just keep driving north.