by Dave Dryfoos
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
The MEGAPACK™ Ebook Series
SOME LIKE IT COLD
TREE, SPARE THAT WOODMAN
BLUNDER ENLIGHTENING
WASTE NOT, WANT
HIGH SIGN
UNIFORM OF A MAN
JOURNEY WORK
“LEST YE BE JUDGED…”
SELLER OF THE SKY
SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS
FACTS OF LIFE
PREFERRED POSITION
SIGN OF LIFE
THE PRICE
MAN
THE OLD-FASHIONED SPACEMAN
BRIDGE CROSSING
THE SIGN OF HOMO SAP
TOO DENSE TO DIE
COPYRIGHT INFO
The Ninth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: Dave Dryfoos is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
* * * *
The MEGAPACK™ ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Dave Dryfoos (1915-2003) is hardly a household word among science fiction readers anymore, but in the early to mid 1950s, he produced a steady stream of frothy SF stories for the likes of Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, and others. This volume assembles 19 of his classic tales.
Enjoy!
—John Betancourt
Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
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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, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)
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TYPOS
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The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany MEGAPACK™”)
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The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
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To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery StorieyX is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
SOME LIKE IT COLD
This Dyt was a likeable kid, see. I didn’t want to carry out no sentence of banishment on him. You take a guy to the Outer Edges, and sooner or later he goes over—and out of existence.
So it was tough, because he’d broken the law all right, as far as I could tell. Harming Rational Critters—that’s Section 509.1. Banishment is the penalty. And I was the cop would have to enforce it, if the Judge said to.
Dyt’s Old Man was the one got him
into this mess. Claimed there was a possibility of life—rational life—in some of the Visual Systems.
I guess you know that a Visual System is a bunch of stars that gives off light-waves—rays like our Sun’s radioshine, only longer. It don’t sound very reasonable there’d be rational life in a light-system, so it’s no wonder Dyt’s Old Man got hooted at. I mean, look, they said in court that the wave-length of a star’s radiation is more or less related to its temperature. So if a star gives off mostly visible light, instead of microwaves like our Sun does, you’d think it’d be all wrong for life.
Even if there was life of some kind or other, folks said it couldn’t be rational. Matter itself must be different in that kind of a System. Time would be different. So any life down there must be awfully different from us, they said. And if it differs from us, how could it be rational? People shouted the Old Man down.
But this kid Dyt wasn’t going to stand for his Old Man being a laughing-stock, so he went after the facts.
His father wasn’t anxious for him to go, but finally doped out the most likely coordinates, and sent him off. Dyt went by adaptation—became a comet, like.
So all right, he gets there to this planet his father told him to look for. It was so small he almost cracked into it—denser than anything he’d ever imagined. And when he got there, he didn’t know what he was looking for.
He was a kid, you understand. Impetuous.
There was a visual star by way of Sun, all right, just like the Old Man told him. It was small, and rotating fast.
Around it was something under a dozen planets, some with satellites going around them, and there was a mess of smaller stuff, too.
And it was all dominated by visual light. You can’t imagine what that does—I can’t, anyhow. Time, for instance. Why, if you lived on this planet he visited—they call it Earth—every single time your little planet rolled over, it would be a day. And every time your little planet ran around its star, that would count for a year.
This Dyt was just a kid, like I said. But on our cosmic time-scale, where it’s a year every time our Sun goes once around the Galactic Center, why, every one of our years is a couple hundred million times as long as one of Earth’s, so Dyt was maybe as old as the planet itself.
Now, how would you make contact with the men of a planet that much different from what we’re used to? I sure wouldn’t know. And neither did Dyt.
Compared to that unbelievably dense planet he was just a soft cloud, so he kind of enveloped it and rested in its gravitational field.
He was looking, he told me, for men. I asked him once, I said, “Dyt, if we’re men, and those people are so different from us, how come they’re men, too?”
