Showing results by narrator "Scott Miller" in All Categories

The base diner was hot and stuffy that night as Scotty Johnson sat with Mitch and Jack and the other boys, sipping his last cup of coffee before Zero Hour rolled around. Mitch and Jack had succeeded in sneaking him out of town before the reporters had guessed what was happening. Now, they sat in silence, sipping their coffee, glancing at him from time to time as though to make sure he were still there. It annoyed Scotty. This was the time to laugh, and joke, and bull away as if nothing was going to happen at all.

Writing stories was hard work - unless Fred had a typewriter like "Reggie" that could write by itself! Nonsense? Fred agreed until he met the plagiarist from Rigel IV. I bought the typewriter in a pawn shop on Third Avenue. The pawn shop proprietor was a balding old man with a walrus mustache. "How much?" I asked him. "Five dollars," he said casually.

He stared with fascination at a heap of newspapers spread out on the corner stand. He could guess the purpose of these layers of white sheets covered with black or red symbols, but he could not yet interpret them, and he had no idea whether anyone had seen or reported his ship. It was almost certain that someone had observed a shooting star, but the chances were very much against any observation having been made of the star’s slow, dark drift to Earth.

If there had ever been a time when Ollie Keith hadn't been hungry, it was so far in the past that he couldn't remember it. He was hungry now as he walked through the alley, his eyes shifting lusterlessly from one heap of rubbish to the next. He was hungry through and through, all 140 pounds of him, the flesh distributed so gauntly over his tall frame that, in spots, it seemed about to wear through, as his clothes had. That it hadn't done so in 42 years sometimes struck Ollie as in the nature of a miracle.

Half of Jupiter's great disk and most of the other moons were below the horizon when the man stepped out of the plane and changed her life. As far as Carol Marsh was concerned, he was ordinary enough in appearance. And she wasn't ordinarily attracted to ordinary men. He was slightly over medium height, his features were not quite regular, and he had a deep tan over what had started out as a sunburn, so that she decided he had misjudged the strength of the sun on some planet with a thin atmosphere.

Homer was a shy Faderfield bachelor; his visitor was a beautiful Pleiades girl. At any rate, she was a girl, and Homer had a problem. The fly rod, the letter, and the small jar of paint were half of the problem Homer Hopkins had to solve. The other half rested in his complex mind. Fader's Fadeless Formulae had offered him a position, not a job, to take charge of its research department, at 10,000 a year, twice what he was paid at Faderfield Junior College to teach chemistry. All this was in the letter.

Harry spent three years in space, waiting to get home to Earth - and his family. They were waiting for him, too - that is, for his corpse. Captain Greene shook his shaggy head and studied Allerton with patient eyes. "You're making a mistake," he said. "You'll be back." The inside of the spaceship was quiet now, not with the silence of the tomb, but with the silence of barely inaudible echoes, as if Allerton might still be able to hear the crew clomping about the companionways on metal-shod feet if only he knew how to listen.

Xhanph was the fully accredited ambassador from Gfun and Earth's first visitor from outer space. History and the amenities called for a tremendous reception. But, Earth people are funny people. All the way over, all through the loneliness of the long trip, he had consoled himself with the thought of the reception he would get; how they would crowd around him, how they would gape and cheer! All the most prominent and most important Earthlings would rush to see him, to touch their own appendages to his tentacles, to receive his report of interplanetary good will.

Silvia secretly planned to divorce George when they reached Arcturus. But a space journey can alter a careful plan - or hatch a worse one. The trouble started when the Arcturus Queen was four billion miles out of Earth, heading for the star after which it was named. It pulled clear of the solar system using conventional drive, then switched into subspace. A few minutes later, the ship shuddered perceptibly, and an authoritative voice came reassuringly from the public address system.

Frane Lewis enjoyed another sadistic shiver as he moved up the narrow passageway to the captain's control room. To his flared nostrils, the warm, moist air of the small space freighter was still heavy with the smell of death. A psychiatrist could have told him that this was a neural confusion of olfactory sensation with the perverted emotional excitement of murder. But no physician ever attended Frane's murders, except at inquests.

You must understand that Palmer loved his wife as much as ever, or he would never have thought of his simple little scheme at all. It was entirely for her own good, as he had told himself a dozen times in the past day. And with that, he stilled whatever qualms of conscience he might otherwise have had. He didn't think of himself as being something of a murderer. Life here had been wonderful, incredibly satisfying. At least it had been that way for him. And now it would be the same way for his wife as well.

It was well after dark when Matt Matthews got back down to the headquarters camp, and saw the city stranger sitting there before the fire. He knew he was a city man after a single glance at the shiny, low-topped shoes and the reminiscence of a crease in the dusty trousers. Matt tossed the gophers and the two small coyotes off his broad shoulders to old Moe Arhelger, across the campfire, staring in suspicious silence from the stranger to Moe and back again. "Who's he?" he asked finally.

The Queen of Space written by Joseph Slotkin: Helen LaTour had the best hip wriggle in galactic Burleyque. In fact, it was so good she hipped herself smack into another dimension! I was relaxin' with my second Plutonian Stinger in the dignified atmosphere of Charley's Venusian Retreat when there was this strange noise outside the dive, like a flock of hot jets hittin' the atmosphere. Right after a character comes bustin' through the door.

Murph, Forsyth, and Jamison heard the alien voice warn them. And to each it sounded familiar - a sweetheart, a son, a hated enemy! In a dwindling spiral, they circled the planet, and Murph's cold blue eyes studied the radar screen. Things looked good: no sign of cities, social denizens, or humanoids. He was scribbling notes on his desk when the all-wave above him started crackling. He watched the green line sweep back and forth along the dial, finally centering on the wavelength that was broadcasting. As it focused, the speaker sputtered in.

Somehow, Jeff Engel followed the stranger into another world - among people who hated all aliens. And, of course, he was now one himself! Jeff Engel studied the feverish crowd hurrying through the subway turnstiles. As he checked each passing face against a card-index mind, he smiled to himself. Even when off duty, the habit persisted. There was always the chance he'd spot a face that would fit, one that would close another active file in the Missing Persons Bureau.

They still talk of Braun, and the Fourth Intergalactic Survey. Other men before him had gone out into the far, dark places. Three previous expeditions had gone out and vanished completely. Then the Venture IV went out and out and out countless miles and light-years and whatever else it is - and out there in the lonely darkness, something happened. Nobody knew exactly what happened, but there was a lot of guessing. Only one man came back. Braun. And there was talk...

The depths of the ocean are as dark and unknowable as the emptiness of space. But to Doctor Clair Margraves, a marine biologist, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of discovery to sate her curiosity. Her next adventure will see her piloting a deep-submersion vehicle on its maiden voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But something strange is going on at the bottom of the ocean floor, something she’s never seen before. And she intends to find out what.

I'm not exactly broke, but this Major Daphne owned more planets than I do golf balls. Whereas my mining interests were mostly on earth, the Major got in early on the Centaurus grab. A whole generation later, all I could stake out was one hot little hunk of tropical mud that no one else would fool with. Daphne liked to kid me about my "galactic empire" every time we collided at the club. I was a bachelor and Daphne was married, but he spent more time there than I.

Disease contaminated their ship; any moment one of them might become infected and spray lethal sparks to the others. There was no cure - except prevention. And, that meant three spacemen left to die! Commander Al Andrews had closed and locked the energy-proof, neutralizing bulkheads against the creeping red glow that infected one quadrant of his circular space ship. Now, he stood in the control center, in the midsection of the revolving wagon-wheel ship, looking at Oakey Matthews.

Maw Coy climbed the fence down at the end of the south pasture and started up the side of the creek, carrying her bundle over her shoulder and puffing slightly at her exertion. She forded the creek there at the place where Hank's old coon dog, Jigger, was killed by the boar three years ago during the hunting season. Jumping from rock to rock across the creek made her puff even harder; Maw Coy wasn't as young as she once was.