The 56th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: Charles A. Stearns E-Book

Charles A. Stearns

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 196

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This volume in the Golden Age of Science Fiction series focuses on another author from the 1940s and 1950s: Charles A. Stearns. He published just over three dozen stories, of which 25 were science fiction that appeared in some of the top magazines of the day. Included in this volume are:

THE BELLY OF GOR JEETL
B-12’s MOON GLOW
COLOR BLIND
THE PLUTO LAMP
THE GRAVE OF SOLON REGH
THE SCAMPERERS
THE MAROONER
PASTORAL AFFAIR

If you enjoy this volume of our best-selling MEGAPACK® series, search this ebook store for "Wildside Press MEGAPACK" to see the complete list -- hundreds of volumes covering science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, adventure, classics, and much more!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

THE 56th GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACK®: CHARLES A. STEARNS

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

ABOUT THE MEGAPACK® SERIES

THE BELLY OF GOR JEETL

B-12’s MOON GLOW

COLOR BLIND

THE PLUTO LAMP

THE GRAVE OF SOLON REGH

THE SCAMPERERS

THE MAROONER

PASTORAL AFFAIR

Wildside Press’s MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

THE 56th GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION MEGAPACK®: CHARLES A. STEARNS

by Charles A. Stearns

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The 56th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: Charles A. Stearnsis copyright © 2023 by Wildside Press, LLC.

The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a registered trademark of Wildside Press, LLC.

All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

You may be asking yourself, “Charles A. Stearns? Who’s that?”

I wouldn’t blame you. I asked myself the same thing when I realized he had published quite a few short stories in the leading science fiction magazines of the 1950s: Galaxy, If, Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, etc.—25 stories, in fact, between 1953 and 1959. He never published a science fiction novel. He seems to have quit writing abruptly, when he was at his peak.

What happened? Who was he? Where did he go?

I began to do some digging. The Internet Science Fiction Database (always a good starting point) has no biographical information, not even a birth date. It does note that he also wrote as Chas A. Stearns, though. The Fictionmags index (which covers more than science fiction) lists 37 stories by him, including westerns (in pulps like Texas Rangers in the late 1940s and 1950s) and mainstream stories in The Saturday Evening Post (starting in the late 1950s to the mid 1960s). So clearly he didn’t stop writing in 1959; he just changed genres. And clearly he wasn’t making a living as a writer.

Next, I tried searching for him on newspapers.com. Little success for any “Charles A. Stearns” who wrote fiction (though The Saturday Evening Post mentioned him in an ad.)

When I decided to focus on the Chicago and New York areas (they were hives of publishing activity in the 1940s and 1950s), I began to get some hits, and now I’m fairly sure I found him: Charles Albert Stearns, Jr. (1916-1984). He would have been 13 when Amazing Stories debuted (13 being the “Golden Age” of science fiction for many readers).

Some of his fiction shows evidence of military service. This Charles A. Stearns was drafted into the army in 1940, at age 24. When he returned home in 1946, he became an insurance salesman. His first published story appeared in 1947, so the timeline works. (And surely the job of insurance salesman left him with a need for an outlet for his imagination. What better than writing? And as a bachelor, he had no family obligations to keep him away from his typewriter evenings and weekends.)

He finally did marry late in life, in 1971 at age 54. With his new wife, he also acquired a pair of stepchildren. Family no doubt kept him from resuming a writing career which, while yielding sales, could hardly be called a runaway success.

So, here is a collection by a “lost” science fiction author from the Golden Age:Charles A. Stearns, insurance salesman and pulpsmith. Enjoy!

ABOUT THE MEGAPACK® SERIES

Over the last decade, 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 email the publisher at [email protected]. Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

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THE BELLY OF GOR JEETL

Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1953.

The hopeful spires of the Friendship Tower, you will recall, rose steadily, tier upon tier, throughout the year A.D. 4000 plus, despite the fact that it was beginning, more and more, to resemble a neoclassical stock exchange than it did a tower, and that the higher it climbed, the lower sank the estate of diplomatic relations among its backers, the nations of the Alliance of Inner Planets.

The Venusians wanted it on Venus because, as they shrewdly noted, Venus is wide open; the vacationer’s planet. Low taxes. Moderate building costs, and a diverting variety of entertainment for the visiting delegates when they should meet. Why the derva-girls alone—

Mars wanted it on Mars, because, they said, the world is centrally located, easily accessible, and the dry climate was sure to preserve the masonry of the Friendship Tower forever, an immortal monument to man’s amicability.

The Jovian colonials wanted it on Ganymede, because that would be most convenient (for Jupiter), and the Ganymedians agreed, if Jupiter would meet their share of the cost.

The kindest thing that can be said of the Saturnians, is that they were exceedingly saturnine. They hadn’t a chance, and they knew it. Everyone expected trouble with Saturn.

Earth got it on Earth, with an overwhelming majority of one vote and eighty-three million dollars.

The Friendship Tower spitted the occasionally-blue sky over Capitol City in less than eleven months from the time its corner-stone was laid, and waited in awesome emptiness for the first friendly meeting of worlds within it.

* * * *

If there was anyone who was completely satisfied with the Tower, it must have been Christopher M. Berthold, who first sketched it with gilt pen on a drawing board, and later drew it in bold lines of steel and plastic on the green horizon of his mother Earth. But Chris Berthold was a dour young man who had never in his life admitted that anything satisfied him.

By no coincidence, the man who built the tower was one of the three most famous architects in the solar system, at the age of only thirty one, but he held the obsession, apparently, that this fame was fleeting, that his public was a fickle group and might abandon him at any moment, that he ought to keep his insurance up, and his unemployment benefits in good standing, just in case. In short, the hell with life, the gloomy old thing.

All this did not keep Camilla Reed from loving him. It merely kept her at her distance. As a reporter for the Gazette, she had known him publicly for five years. As the freckle-faced little girl next door (remember?), she had been acquainted with his virtues and his idiosyncrasies since childhood, and worshipped them.

The only thing was, Camilla was still freckle-faced, and she had not grown up into a ravishingly beautiful young woman, the way freckle-faced little girls do in stories. Chris Berthold did not grovel at her feet—in fact, he scarcely seemed to know that she was alive—and nobody, so far, was living happily ever after. It was most discouraging.

Girl reporters are supposed to be fascinatingly flippant. Camilla often stammered through interviews. They are supposed to be vivacious, with lovely red hair; she was quiet, diminutive, and her hair was an indeterminate shade of brown. Reporters are supposed to be ill-mannered, inconsiderate of the privacy of others, cocky, devilish. Camilla was none of these.

That was the reason she often got into places no other newsperson could, scooped ace reporters, and came away leaving a warm, co-operative glow in the hearts of important people. And she didn’t even suspect it.

She was on hand, along with five hundred and seventeen other reporters the day they opened the Friendship Building to the first Congress of the Alliance. The other five hundred and seventeen reporters were collaring the delegates as they arrived, pumping them dry of words, and setting them free. Camilla was only looking for Chris Berthold.

She discovered him, at last, in the visitor’s gallery, where he hadn’t any business to be. She sacrificed her seat in the reserved section, tramped on three sets of toes getting out, and made for him like a homing pigeon.

The mezzanine level was crowded. Fifteen acres of milling, pleasantly buzzing humanity—and some of them not so human. She pushed her way among them, wishing, for once, that she were six inches taller. She had marked her course by a pillar, but now all pillars were beginning to look alike. It was half an hour before she found him, leaning against the railing, staring not at the boiling sea of humanity below, but moodily at the domed roof.

“Hi!” she said.

He turned, recognized her with a faintly absent glare. “Hello, Cam. What’re you doing here?”

She repressed a desire to run her fingers through his hair. Darkly exciting hair it was. “Covering,” she said vaguely. “Imagine us running into each other here. Why, you ought to be down there with the Vips. The rest of them, I mean.”

* * * *

He snarled. “There’s too many on the proscenium now. The flooring will warp. I warned them about it.” He grumbled at length about the stinginess of the Government, and the cupidity of certain fly-by-night contractors. It was a familiar tirade. She listened patiently until he was finished. It didn’t matter to Camilla what he talked about it. She just loved to hear his voice.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “I mean a place that will hold a hundred thousand people. It’s a shame that you can stand right here among all these people, and nobody even recognizes you—the man who built it.”

“I like it this way,” he said. “Supposing it falls down tomorrow. Then where would I be?”

She started to laugh, and his look froze her. Camilla bit her lip. “I don’t see you around much lately,” she said, desperately changing the subject.

“I’ve been pretty busy.”

“I know.” A lag in the conversation. They watched the panorama below. Loudspeakers were blaring out the names of the delegates as they arrived.

The loudspeaker: “HIS EXCELLENCY, LORD CHANCELLOR OF MORDANA, THIRD DISTRICT, MARS.”

A red beetle-being, scarcely four feet tall, followed by a retinue of twenty guards and assistants, scurried along the roped-off aisle to the central council table.

“THE HONORABLE YUN BROOL, REPRESENTATIVE, SECTOR 263, JUPITER.”

A dark-suited group of humanoids, faintly alien in aspect, walking close together. They looked faintly disdainful of the proceedings. Which was Yun Brool? They were identically dressed.

“You can bet the one in the middle is Brool,” Camilla said to Chris. “Jovians are always afraid of being assassinated.”

“Umm,” said Christopher Berthold, gazing suspiciously at a rubberneck a few yards away, who showed every evidence that he was about to scratch his initials in one of the pseudo-marble columns with his pen-knife.

“SEVERN ALON, TERRITORIAL CHIEFTAIN, IO.”

“The Noble Experiment,” Chris said, “Do they really think it will work?”

“What’s that?” Camilla said. “Say, look! There’s a funny one coming in now.”

His answer was drowned. “DR. GOR JEETL, ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER OF FOREIGN RELATIONS, FIRST ADMINISTRATIVE DISTRICT, SATURN.”

There was a lull of sound below, followed by a high-pitched song of excitement. It had been rumored that Saturn would send no representative to this meeting.

Dr. Gor Jeetl was alone, but it might have been remarked (as doubtless it was many times) that he was quite a congregation by himself. He appeared to be of Terran extraction, except that no Earthman of modern times was ever so huge. He must have weighed more than the entire Martian contingent.

Roughly eight feet in height, his girth was such that when he walked it was like the progression of an out-sized balloon, all dressed in loose-fitting blue uniform.

“What a bel—” Camilla said. “I mean, look at the size of him.”

“Disgusting,” said Chris.

* * * *

Gor Jeetl, if he sensed the hostility in that gigantic meeting house, gave no sign of it. Propelling his paunch agilely before him, he beamed benignly upon them all as he made his way to the council table.

He took a seat—rather, tried to take a seat. It was impossible. A hurried conference. They brought another quickly, without confining arm-rests. He flowed onto it, gratefully.

The guards began to clear the main floor, boosting the crowd back upstairs. It was almost time for the assembly to come to order.

But there was something not right here. Camilla sensed it. An undercurrent of tenseness about the great table below. The look on Chris’s face. A wolf-like watchfulness. Chris always expected the worst, she knew from hard experience, but this was something special.

“They’re frightened,” she said with sudden inspiration. “Why are they frightened?”

Chris gave her a look of sour disapproval. “You’re a reporter,” he said accusingly. “If I tell you something, can you keep it under your hat until the thing’s done with?”

“Sure I can.”

He didn’t look at her. “There’s a rumor going around among the delegates,” he said. “They say a bomb has been smuggled in. Nothing to it, of course, but—”

“The Saturnians?”

He shrugged savagely. “How would I know?”

“Something is going to happen,” Camilla said. “I feel it.”

“Nonsense. Anyway, I only care about the building. Diplomats are a dime a dozen.”

This isn’t like him, Camilla was thinking. He’s always predicting calamities, but now—

“You could be killed here,” he said, with no particular inflection. “But I don’t suppose you could be talked into leaving if you knew the roof was coming down on your head?”

“What?” she laughed, “and have the city editor slit my throat?” But her heart leaped. It had sounded almost as though he were just a little concerned for her safety.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said after a moment. “Where were you intending to have lunch?”

“N-nowhere in particular,” she said eagerly.

“Don’t eat here,” he advised her glumly. “The vendomats are sluggish. The heating coils are inadequate, and the selectors should have had cadmium breakers instead of the cheap stuff. I designed it that way, but you can’t tell them anything. Well, I’ve got to be getting along. See you later.”

* * * *

Telug Three-seven-gee, lately of Venus, was not so frivolous as his brilliantly red comb made him appear. It arched his carapaced back and stood stiffly erect upon his bald pate, like the plumed helmet of ancient Greek warriors, quivering slightly as he endeavored to hear and annotate everything that was said. He was Amanuensis Extraordinary to his party, and his keen ears were highly trained.

He was the first to hear the ticking sound. It was not like the tick of a watch. Subtly different. It was, however, rather like something else he had heard once. But that could not be.

Could it?

Furtively he glanced around him. Over there sat the Martian delegation, brilliant, cynical little creatures. Near them were the Earth men. And on the other side, the black tunicked Jovians.

To his right was his own party. Nothing among them would make such a sound, he was certain.

On Telug’s other side sat the Saturnian representative, Dr. Gor Jeetl. Dr. Jeetl sat tranquilly listening to the discourse of a hundred diplomats with a fixed smile on his circular face. His abdomen rested comfortably upon his knees, making a kind of dais upon which to place his folded arms.

The ticking was coming from Gor Jeetl. It was extremely faint. No one but Telug could have heard it.

Efficient secretary that he was, he immediately penned a note, folded it twice, and passed it down to the leader of his party, Madong Five-seven-ex. It might have noted that Telug’s topknot had turned quite pale.

Madong, resplendent in his custard-yellow suit, read the note. He leaned over so that he could catch Telug’s eye, past the three Venusians that sat between them. Telug nodded gravely.

Madong pressed the red button in front of him, requesting audience. He was recognized by the chairman.

Madong stood. His heavy lips felt dry. He licked them with bulbous, blue tongue. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “the Venusian delegation respectfully requests permission to withdraw from the assembly of Friendship until further notice.”

Mr. Chairman eyed him keenly. He was a shrewd Ganymedian. “May we ask the reason for this request?”

“The Venusian delegation would rather not say.”

An ominous ripple progressed around the table, affecting every person except, perhaps, one Gor Jeetl. He was gravely contemplating his silver belt buckle.

“Obviously,” the Ganymedian chairman said, “we cannot permit the gentlemen from Venus to leave unless they consent to explain their action.”

Madong, emissary of Venus, sprang up with apparent agitation. He started around the table, heels clicking loudly on the floor. It seemed that it required fifteen minutes for him to circumnavigate that huge circle, but it could not have been half so long.

He whispered in the chairman’s ear.

“Are you sure?” the chairman said, louder than he had intended. Everyone jumped. Almost everyone.

Madong nodded in a positive fashion.

The chairman rapped with his gavel. “We will take a recess,” he said. “Fifteen minutes.” He turned and whispered to two khaki-clad Terran guards.

The delegates sprang up willingly, milled about, chattering among themselves as they left the conference area.

* * * *

Arising was quite a problem for Dr. Gor Jeetl. He had no arm-rests on his chair, you will recall, on which to brace his hands. Nevertheless, he was sure that he could make it. He turned sidewise on his inadequate seat, placed one hand on the back of his chair and made a heroic effort. Nothing happened. A heavy weight on each shoulder was holding him down.

Two white-gloved clad hands. He looked up with some surprise into the faces of the two guards.

There was not the slightest trace of compassion there. Two gendarmes sans merci.

The Captain of the Friendship Tower Guards was a fearless, red-faced man. Captains of the Guard are always red-faced and fearless. He spitted the Assistant Commissioner of Foreign Relations of Saturn with his gimlet eye, an impressive man who knew the overwhelming weight of his own personality.

The gallery was silent. The people knew that something extraordinary was going on, so they quelled the normal impulse to discuss it in order to satisfy that strongest of human yearnings. If they were quiet there was a bare possibility that they might hear something. The Word was not yet in the air. When it came they would change from rational beings into a huge, slavering beast—a mob. But the time was not yet; the beast lay hidden.

Gor Jeetl appeared mildly curious as to the reason for this sudden surplus of attention with which he was being deluged.

“Why am I held, Captain?” he asked. “It seems most inhospitable, to say the least. Think what this may do to the relations between our worlds, yours and my native Saturn.”

“We have already thought of that,” the Captain said.

“You have?” said Dr. Jeetl, surprised.

“Come, come,” the Captain said. “The game’s up. We know all about you, Fatty. One of the Venusian party heard the ticking.”

Gor Jeetl turned crimson throughout the vast expanse of his sagging jowls and three chins. “So you know!” he breathed. “I shall report your rudeness, nonetheless.”

“Sure. Do that. Meanwhile, just where is it? You were scanned when you came in, along with everyone else.”

“Here, of course,” said Gor Jeetl, placing a hand upon his stomach with dignity. “Clever of them, and most convenient, I will admit, though I have loathed the knowledge. If only—”

The Captain laid his ear to the vast expanse of stomach. His eyes widened. “Incredible,” he said. “When is the—the machine set for?”

“I see no harm in divulging that now,” Dr. Jeetl said. “It is timed for Earth noon.”

“You see no harm—you see no—!” The Captain tried to laugh, and strangled on it. He looked like a man reprieved from the grave. “There’s time, you imbecile! Supposing we spirited you out of here—dropped you in the ocean?”

“Please!” Dr. Gor Jeetl smiled wanly. “The mechanism is extremely delicate. You are likely to upset it talking of such unpleasant things.”

The Captain of the Guards blanched. “You are saying that we dare not move you?”

“It would be hazardous.”

The Captain took out a tiny instrument and waved it like a wand over Gor Jeetl’s middle. The pinpoint light on the gadget blinked rapidly.

“Radiation,” he said. “It’s worse than we thought.”

“Such a thing—inside him?” an assistant asked incredulously.

“Of course. Don’t you see the diabolical cleverness of the Saturnian’s choice. Inside him, there’d be room for a whole armoury.”

“It was the only practical thing,” said Gor Jeetl, with quiet bitterness.

“There is only one thing to do,” the Captain of the Guard said, “and that is to clear the area at once. Rogers, you will inform the Superintendent, and also the platoon leader on the gallery floor. I’ll take care of things here.”

But his last words were lost in a savage roar that grew into a tornadic fury of sound, filling the hall, battering at their ears, threatening sanity.

For someone had been indiscreet. The crowd had the Word, and had become the beast.

Bomb!

* * * *

It was exactly 11:18 when they broke. In the history of that decade there had been no comparable disaster. Nine died. Thousands were injured. They poured down the spiral causeways like the flood of spring rains over a dam, and it was said later that only the superb designing job of the architect, Christopher Berthold, prevented casualties from being much higher.

It required twenty minutes to clear the building. It would have taken six, if it could have been done in orderly fashion.

The police were to clear the sector of the city for three miles in each direction. There was no need. No citizen stopped running half so near as that. Of course, later on, when the panic had subsided, the streets had to be roped off and guarded to prevent them from trooping back, for fear they might miss something. That was human nature, and to be expected.

The diplomats were herded, with diplomacy, into the Grand Solar Hotel in another part of the city, and closely guarded. The Friendship Tower, looming whitely against the skyline, was suddenly vacant.

Well, almost vacant. In the great meeting hall, at the table which dwarfed even his respectable figure, sat the delegate from Saturn, Dr. Gor Jeetl, obediently following the orders of Terran authorities. He was the merest speck in the vast place, and if there had been any there to see, they would have noted a stolid determination in the set of his mouth—the look of a dedicated man.

For, after all, it had been Saturn’s plan, people said, merely to destroy the building; the destruction of ten thousand beings had been, in itself, incidental, it it had occurred. The fission bomb planted in Gor Jeetl’s belly through some incredible operation would accomplish its purpose, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.