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  The alien creature who was required by Terran law to beat his wife

  The computer that was entered in a chess tournament

  The treasure horde in space that was really a deadly bomb

  The interstellar explorers who became gods

  You’ll read about all of these in THE IF READER OF SCIENCE FICTION, a fascinating collection of stories from the pages of today’s most popular s-f magazine. It’s a grab-bag of imagination and adventure, by the top writers of modern science fiction. Enjoy, enjoy!

  THE IF READER OF SCIENCE FICTION

  Copyright ©, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, by Galaxy Publishing Corp. An Ace Book, by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover by Cosimo Scianna. Interior artwork by Jack Gaughan.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN TIME WAS NEW

  FATHER OF THE STARS

  THE LIFE HATER

  OLD TESTAMENT

  THE SILKIE

  A BETTER MOUSETRAP

  LONG DAY IN COURT

  TRICK OR TREATY

  THE 64-SQUARE MADHOUSE

  THE

  IF

  READER

  OF

  SCIENCE

  FICTION

  Over the years—nearly fourteen of them have passed since the first issue of If hit the stands, part of the science-fiction explosion of the early 1950s—this little magazine has used up more editors than one would think. Paul Fairman, James L. Quinn, Eva Wulff, Larry T. Shaw, Damon Knight, and H. L. Gold all served their terms on the bridge, and it was with a certain surprise that we realized the other day that, with five years of running it behind us, we have become Ifs senior editor.

  When we took over, late in 1960, we had an idea that we knew what If ought to be. At that time there were five other science-fiction magazines going in the United States. There was Galaxy, which we took on at the same time; there was John Campbell’s Analog; there was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; and there were hoary old Amazing Stories, class of 1926, and its companion, Fantastic.

  That was all. Each of these magazines had something to recommend it, of course. They had to have: they were the survivors of the boom days when thirty or forty science-fiction magazines were dividing up the audience, and they would never have made it through the shake-out if they hadn’t built a sturdy core of readers. But estimable as they were, there were only six of them all told. And there were large areas of theme, all of them a part of science-fiction s proper concern, that either just wouldn’t fit in any of the existing magazines, or were obviously out of place and uncomfortable there when they did.

  In fact there was, to be truthful, a sort of mood of dull apathy over the field. It might not always show to the casual readers—the magazines kept coming out, and printed some first-rate stories all along—but it showed in the trade talk of the writers and editors of science fiction. A lot of grand old thunderers of the past had quit writing science fiction entirely. Not much new blood was coming along. The dogged veterans who were sticking with the field because they liked it, and wanted to go on liking it, were still producing—but even they seemed to be writing rather less than before, and most of them were cautiously experimenting with other fields: a yam for Playboy here, a TV script there, a mystery novel or a book on comparative religion or the gee-whiz wonders of factual science. And the talk contained sentiments like “What’s the use?” and “I’ve personally given up reading science fiction—can’t get interested,” and so on.

  Of course there are cycles in public opinion—even in the mood of so small a group as the Ancient and Free-Swinging Order of Science-Fiction Writers. As a veteran of thirty-odd years in the trade, we recall any number of them from the past. Excitement in the early thirties; apathy by the middle of the decade. A recrudescence of vigor around 1940, a dulling just after World War II. A boil-up in 1950 and thereabouts that produced dozens of new magazines and scores of new writers . . . and, of course, a slump that followed a decade or so later.

  What we’re trying to say is that no doubt the pendulum was about to reverse its swing anyhow. But we did our best to give it a little push.

  A condition diagnostic for the disease that was just then giving science-fiction a bilious look was the feeling among many science-fiction writers that there were some stories they might as well not bother to write . . . because they would never be able to find a magazine to print them. For the existing magazines were all specialists. Their policies were (or seemed to be to the writers, which came to much the same thing) exclusive rather than inclusive. They were known by their tabus.

  So what we thought was:

  First, let’s make If a magazine that has no restrictions on subject matter or development—or at any rate, as nearly so as is possible to do and still retain some shape to the magazine.

  Second, let’s go after new blood. Among the readers, by printing the land of sprightly or hero-adventurous stories that the other magazines appeared to consider beneath their dignity. Among the writers, by going all-out to find and develop new talents. (And for the past four years If has made it a policy to publish at least one story in each issue by a writer who has never previously appeared in print. Jonathan Brand, represented in this volume, is one of them. There have been quite a few such writers since then, and we’re pleased to report that at least a dozen of them look like going on to be the new “big names” in the field before long.)

  Third, let’s lure, coax, bribe, or bully as many of the great writers of the past back into production as is humanly possible. And in the past few years we’ve been able to get at least a score of stories from people like Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., Robert A. Heinlein, Hal Clement, A. E. Van Vogt and others who had either appeared only at rare intervals or, like Van Vogt, had been fourteen years between stories for any science-fiction magazine until he came back to us a couple of years ago. (And has been appearing fairly frequently since. See, for instance, his The Silkie.)

  Early on we stumbled across a story by a man named Keith Laumer; it was called The Frozen Planet, and it concerned the adventures of a whacky interstellar diplomat named Retief. Laumer was then an Air Force captain stationed in England, with plenty of time to write—which was fortunate, because in Retief we recognized a spirit of color, adventure, and excitement that was just what the doctor ordered. We’ve averaged about two Retief stories out of every three issues ever since, and propose to go on doing so indefinitely. (See Trick or Treaty, herein.) A new writer named Fred Saberhagen began producing stories about a wonderful class of robot spacecraft called “the berserkers,” left over from an ancient interstellar war and now dedicated to the extermination of every living creature (as in The Life Hater). We expect to have many more of them, too.

  But If hasn’t been all series stories by a long shot; as much as Retief and the berserkers we prize the singles like Fritz Leiber’s The 64-Square Madhouse and—well, and all the others we’ve included herein; and a great many that there wasn’t room for.

  What we set out to do in If, you see, was to provide a magazine that would be fun for readers to read, and fun for writers to write for. What we didn’t realize at first, but now enjoy very much, is that that means a magazine that is fun to edit as well!

  FREDERIK POHL

  Red Bank, New
Jersey

  The stegosaurus standing beneath the ginkgo tree didn’t surprise Carpenter, but the two kids sitting in the branches did. He had expected to meet up with a stegosaurus sooner or later, but he hadn’t expected to meet up with a boy and a girl. What in the name of all that was Mesozoic were they doing in the upper Cretaceous Period!

  Maybe, he reflected, leaning forward in the driver’s seat of his battery-powered triceratank, they were tied in in some way with the anachronistic fossil he had come back to the Age of Dinosaurs to investigate. Certainly the fact that Miss Sands, his chief assistant who had cased the place-time on the timescope, had said nothing about a couple of kids, meant nothing. Timescopes registered only the general lay of the land. They seldom showed anything smaller than a medium-sized mountain.

  The stego nudged the trunk of the ginkgo with a hip as high as a hill. The tree gave such a convulsive shudder that the two children nearly fell off the branch they were silting on and came tumbling down upon the serrated ridge of the monster’s back. Their faces were as white as (lie line of cliffs that showed distantly beyond the scatterings of dogwoods and magnolias and live oaks, and the stands of willows and laurels and fan palms, that patterned the prehistoric plain.

  Carpenter braced himself in the driver’s seat. “Come on, Sam,” he said, addressing the triceratank by nickname. “Let’s go get it!”

  Since leaving the entry area several hours ago, he had been moving along in low gear in order not to miss any potential clues that might point the way to the anachronistic fossil’s place of origin—a locale which, as was usually the case with unidentifiable anachronisms, the paleontological society that employed him had been able to pinpoint much more accurately in time than in space. Now, he threw Sam into second and focused the three horn-howitzers jutting from the reptivehicle’s facial regions on the sacral ganglion of the offending omithischian. Plugg! Plugg! Plugg! went the three stun charges as they struck home, and down went the a posteriori section of the stego. The anterior section, apprised by the pea-sized brain that something had gone haywire, twisted far enough around for one of the little eyes in the pint-sized head to take in the approaching triceratank, whereupon the stubby forelegs immediately began the herculean task of dragging the ten-ton, humpbacked body out of the theater of operations.

  Carpenter grinned. “Take it easy, old mountainsides,” he said. “You’ll be on all four feet again in less time than it takes to say ‘Tyrannosaurus rex’.”

  After bringing Sam to a halt a dozen yards from the base of the ginko, he looked up at the two terrified children through the one-way transparency of the reptivehicle’s skullnacelle. If anything, their faces were even whiter than they had been before. Small wonder. Sam looked more like a triceratops than most real triceratops did. Raising’ the nacelle, Carpenter recoiled a little from the sudden contrast between the humid heat of the midsummer’s day and Sam’s air-conditioned interior. He stood up in the driver’s compartment and showed himself. “Come on down, you two,” he called. “Nobody’s going to eat you.”

  Two pairs of the widest and bluest eyes that he had ever seen came to rest upon his face. In neither pair, however, was there the faintest gleam of understanding. “I said come on down,” he repeated. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  The boy turned to the girl, and the two of them began jabbering back and forth in a sing-song tongue that resembled Chinese, but only as the mist resembles the rain.

  It had no more in common with modem American than its speakers had with their surroundings. Clearly they hadn’t understood a word he had said. But, equally as clearly, they must have found reassurance in his plain and honest face, or perhaps in the gentle tone of his voice. After talking the matter over for a few moments, they left their aerie and shinned down the trunk, the boy going first and helping the girl over the rough spots. He was about nine; she was about eleven.

  Carpenter stepped out of the compartment, vaulted down from Sam’s steel snout and went over to where they were standing. By this time, the stego had recovered the use of its hind legs and was high-tailing—or rather, high-backing—it over the plain. The boy was wearing a loose, apricot-colored blouse which was considerably stained and disheveled from his recent arboreal activities, a pair of apricot-colored slacks which were similarly stained and disheveled and which terminated at his thin calves and a pair of open-toe sandals. The girl’s outfit was identical, save that it was azure in hue and somewhat less stained and disheveled. She was about an inch taller than the boy, but no less thin. Both of them had delicate features, and hair the color of buttercups, and both of them wore expressions so solemn as to be almost ludicrous. It was virtually a sure bet that they were brother and sister.

  Gazing earnestly up into Carpenters gray eyes, the girl gave voice a series of sing-song phrases, each of them, judging from the nuances of pronunciation, representative of a different language.

  When she finished, Carpenter shook his head. “I just don’t dig you, pumpkin,” he said. Then, just to make sure, lie repeated the remark in Anglo-Saxon, Aeolic Greek, lower Cro-magnonese, upper-Acheulian, middle English, Iroquoian and Hyannis-Portese, smatterings of which tongues and dialects he had picked up during his various sojourns in the past. No dice. Every word he spoke was just plain Greek to the girl and the boy.

  Suddenly the girl’s eyes sparkled with excitement, and, plunging her hand into a plastic reticule that hung from (the belt that supported her slacks, she withdrew what appeared to be three pairs of hearrings. She handed one pair to Carpenter, one to the boy, and kept one for herself; then she and the boy proceeded to affix the objects to their ear lobes, motioning to Carpenter to do the same. Complying, he discovered that the tiny disks which he had taken for pendants were in reality tiny diaphragms of some kind. Once the minute clamps were tightened into place, they fitted just within the ear openings. The girl regarded his handiwork critically for a moment, then, standing on tiptoe, reached up and adjusted each disk with deft fingers. Satisfied, she stepped back. “Now,” she said, in perfect idiomatic English, “we can get through to each other and find out what’s what.”

  Carpenter stared at her. “Well I must say, you caught on to my language awful fast!”

  “Oh, we didn’t learn it,” the boy said. “Those are microtranslators—hearrings. With them on, whatever we say sounds to you the way you would say it, and whatever you say sounds to us the way we would say it.”

  “I forgot I had them with me,” said the girl. “They’re standard travelers’ equipment, but, not being a traveler in the strict sense of the word, I wouldn’t have happened to have them. Only I’d just got back from foreign-activities class when the kidnapers grabbed me. Now,” she went on, again gazing earnestly up into Carpenter’s eyes, “I think it will be best if we take care of the amenities first, don’t you? My name is Marcy, this is my brother Slap, and we are from Greater Mars. What is your name, and where are you from, kind sir?”

  It wasn’t easy, but Carpenter managed to keep his voice matter-of-fact. It was no more than fair that he should have. If anything, what he had to say was even more incredible that what he had just heard. “I’m Howard Carpenter, and I’m from Earth, A.D. 2156. That’s 79,062,156 years from now.” He pointed to the triceratank. “Sam over there is my time machine—among other things. When powered from an outside source, there’s practically no limit to his field of operations.”

  The girl blinked once, and so did the boy. But that was all. “Well,” Marcy said presently, “that much is taken care of: you’re from Earth Future and we’re from Mars Present.” She paused, looking at Carpenter curiously. “Is there something you don’t understand, Mr. Carpenter?”

  Carpenter took a deep breath. He exhaled it. “In point of fact, yes. For one thing, there’s the little matter of the difference in gravity between the two planets. Here on

  Earth you weigh more than twice as much as you weigh on Mars, and I can’t quite figure out how you can move around so effortlessly, to say nothing
of how you could have shinned up the trunk of that ginkgo tree.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean, Mr. Carpenter,” Marcy said. “And it’s a very good point, too. But obviously you’re using Mars Future as a criterion, and just as obviously Mars Future is no longer quite the same as Mars Present. I—I guess a lot can happen in 79,062,156 years. Well, anyway, Mr. Carpenter,” she continued, “the Mars of Skip’s and my day has a gravity that approximates this planet’s. Centuries ago, you see, our engineers artificially increased the existent gravity in order that no more of our atmosphere could escape into space, and successive generations had adapted themselves to the stronger pull. Does that clarify matters for you, Mr. Carpenter?”

  He had to admit that it did. “Do you kids have a last name?” he asked.

  “No, we don’t, Mr. Carpenter. At one time it was the custom for Martians to have last names, but when desentimentalization was introduced, the custom was abolished. Before we proceed any further, Mr. Carpenter, I would like to thank you for saving our lives. It—it was very noble of you.”

  “You’re most welcome,” Carpenter said, “but I’m afraid if we go on standing here in the open like this, I’m going to have to save them all over again, and my own to boot. So let’s the three of us get inside Sam where it’s safe. All right?” Leading the way over to the triceratank, he vaulted up on the snout and reached down for the girl’s hand. After pulling her up beside him, he helped her into the driver’s compartment. “There’s a small doorway behind the driver’s seat,” he told her. “Crawl through it and make yourself at home in the cabin just beyond. You’ll find a table and chairs and a bunk, plus a cupboard filled with good things to eat. All the comforts of home.”

  Before she could comply, a weird whistling sound came from above the plain. She glanced at the sky, and her face went dead-white. “It’s them!” she gasped. “They’ve found us already!”