Archibald Joe - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol. 5

(5/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume V: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories Various

Series:	15 [5]
Published:	2010

---

Product Description
This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains fifty science fiction short stories by more than forty different authors. Many of the stories in this collection were published during the heyday of popular science fiction magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Included within this work are stories by Phillip K. Dick, Randall Garrett, Harry Harrison, H. Beam Piper, Edmund Hamilton, Paul Ernst, Fredric Brown, Randall Garrett, Jack Williamson, Stanley Weinbaum, C.M. Kornbluth, and many others.

This collection is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.

Contents:

OPERATION EARTHWORM by Joe Archibald
AGGRAVATION OF ELMER by Robert Andrew Arthur
LAST RESORT by Stephen Bartholomew
WHERE THERE'S HOPE, by Jerome Bixby
ZERO HOUR by Alexander Blade
LIGHTER THAN YOU THINK by Nelson Bond
A PRIZE FOR EDIE by Jesse Franklin Bone
THE EINSTEIN SEE-SAW by Miles John Breuer
HALL OF MIRRORS by Fredric Brown
WEAK ON SQUARE ROOTS by Russell Burton
HARD GUY by H. B. Carleton
THE PERFECTIONISTS by Arnold Castle
COMPETITION by James Causey
FINAL WEAPON by Everett B. Cole
BEYOND THE VANISHING POINT by Ray Cummings
THE GUN by Philip K. Dick
MAROONED UNDER THE SEA by Paul Ernst
THE GIFT BEARER by Charles L. Fontenay
EXILE by H. B. Fyfe
AFTER A FEW WORDS by Randall Garrett
THE BLUFF OF THE HAWK by Anthony Gilmore
CRY FROM A FAR PLANET by Tom Godwin
THE SECOND SATELLITE by Edmond Hamilton
TOY SHOP by Harry Harrison
THE ALTAR AT MIDNIGHT by C.M. Kornbluth
ALL DAY SEPTEMBER by Roger Kuykendall
JOIN OUR GANG? by Sterling E. Lanier
DISTURBING SUN by Philip Latham
THE YILLIAN WAY by Keith Laumer
ONE MARTIAN AFTERNOON by Tom Leahy
JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT by William Lee
A BOTTLE OF OLD WINE by Richard O. Lewis
DAUGHTERS OF DOOM by Herbert Livingston
G-R-R-R...! by Robert Donald Locke
NEXT DOOR, NEXT WORLD by Robert Donald Locke
THE BIG TOMORROW by Paul Lohrman
THE MAN FROM TIME by Frank Belknap Long
WHEN I GROW UP by Richard E. Lowe
AND ALL THE EARTH A GRAVE by C.C. MacApp
BLACK EYES AND THE DAILY GRIND by Stephen Marlowe
PUSHBUTTON WAR by Joseph P. Martino
REX EX MACHINA by Frederic Max
DEAREST by H. Beam Piper
SORRY: WRONG DIMENSION by Ross Rocklynne
THE SECOND VOICE by Mann Rubin
CREATURES OF VIBRATION by Harl Vincent
A MARTIAN ODYSSEY by Stanley G. Weinbaum
THE LAKE OF LIGHT by Jack Williamson
UNDER ARCTIC ICE by H.G. Winter
LONESOME HEARTS by Russ Winterbotham

Halcyon Classics Series

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME V:

AN ANTHOLOGY OF 50 SHORT STORIES

Contents

---

OPERATION EARTHWORM

by Joe Archibald

Here he is again, the irrepressible Septimus Spink, in a tale as rollicking as an elder giant juggling the stars and the planets in his great, golden hands and laughing mirthfully as one tiny world--our own--goes spinning away from him into caverns measureless to man. With specifications drawn to scale, Joe Archibald, whose versatility with the quill never ceases to amaze us, has managed with slangy insouciance to achieve a rare triumph over space and time, and to aureole Spink in a resplendent sunburst of imperishable renown.

Septimus Spink didn't need to read Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." He had more amazing ideas of his own.

Interplanetary Press, Circa 2022--Septimus Spink, the first Earthman to reach and return from New Mu in a flying saucer, threw a hydroactive bombshell into the meeting of the leading cosmogonists at the University of Cincinnatus today. The amazing Spink, uninvited, crashed this august body of scientists and laughed at a statement made by Professor Apsox Zalpha as to the origin of Earth and other planets.

"That theory is older than the discovery of the antiquated zipper," Spink orated. "Ha, you big plexidomes still believe the Earth was condensed from a filament, and was ejected by the sun under the gravitational attraction of a big star passing close to the Earth's surface. First it was a liquid drop and cooling solidified it after a period of a few million years. You citizens still think it has a liquid core. Some of you think it is pretty hot inside like they had atomic furnaces all fired up. Ha, the exterior ain't so hot either what with taxes we have to pay after seven wars."

Professor Yzylch Mgogylvy, of the University of Juno, took violent exception to Septimus Spink's derisive attitude and stoutly defended the theory of adiabatic expansion. It was at this juncture that Spink practically disintegrated the meeting.

"For the last seventy years," he orated, "all we have thought about was outer space. All that we have been hepped up about is what is up in the attic and have forgot the cellar. What proof has any knucklehelmet got that nobody lives far under the coal mines and the oil pockets? Something lives everywhere! Adam never believed anythin' lived in water until he was bit by a crab. Gentlemen, I am announcin' for the benefit of the press and everybody from here to Mars and Jupiter and back that I intend to explore inner space! I have already got the project underway."

A near panic ensued as representatives of the press made for the audio-viso stellartypes. "You think volcanoes are caused by heat generated far down inside the earth. They are only boils or carbuncles. Awright, where do earthquakes come from?" Here Spink laughed once more. "They are elastic waves sent out through the body of the Earth, huh? Their observed times of transmission give a means of finding their velocities of propagation at great depths. I read that in a book that should be in the Terra-firmament Institute along with the Spirit of St. Louis."

Septimus Spink walked out at this point, surrounded by Interplanetary scribes, one of whom was Exmud R. Zmorro. Spink informed the Fourteenth Estate that he would let them have a gander at the model of his inner space machine in due time. He inferred that one of his financial backers in the fabulous enterprise was Aquintax Djupont, and that the fact that Djupont had recently been brain-washed at the Neuropsychiatorium in Metropolita had no bearing on the case whatsoever.

* * * * *

I am seeing and listening to that news item right now which has been repeated a dozen times the last twenty-four hours as if nobody could believe it. I am Septimus Spink, and descended from a long line of Spinks that began somewhere back at the time they put up the pyramids.

All my ancestors was never satisfied with what progress they saw during when they lived, and they are the reasons we have got where we are today. And if there was no Spinks today the scientists would get away with saying that the Earth was only a drop from the sun that got a crust on it after millions of years. And they want to send me back to get fitted for a duronylon strait jacket again.

An hour after I shut off the viso-screen, and while I am taking my calves' liver and onion capsules, my friend and space-lanceman, D'Ambrosia Zahooli comes in. He just qualifies as a spaceman as he takes up very little and is not much easier to look at than a Nougatine. Once D'Ambrosia applied for a plasticectomy but the surgeons at the Muzayo clinic just laughed and told him there was a limit to science even in the year 2022. But the citizen was at home when they divided the brains. Of course that is only my opinion. He is to fly with me into inner space.