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- Herausgeber: Wildside Press
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
When enemy spaceships ride aloft in menacing array, Dr. Murfree again calls on the amazing hillbilly genius, Bud Gregory, for help.
Das E-Book The Seven Temporary Moons wird angeboten von Wildside Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
sci-fi;future;science fiction;pulp;adventure;short story;classic
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Table of Contents
THE SEVEN TEMPORARY MOONS, by Murray Leinster
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
THE SEVEN TEMPORARY MOONS,by Murray Leinster
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2023 by Wildside Press LLC.
Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1948, as by “William Fitzgerald.”
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com | blackcatweekly.com
INTRODUCTION,by John Betancourt
William F. Jenkins (1896–1975)—who wrote science fiction under several names, but primarily “Murray Leinster”—was one of the few early writers of speculative fiction to publish strong, relevant fiction over the course of 7 decades (Jack Williamson was another). Jenkins began publishing science fiction for pulp magazines before the term “science fiction” was even coined.
His success may have been due to his work in multiple genres, which kept his writing fresh in each one. I have assembled his novels and stories into a series of collections for Wildside Press’s MEGAPACK® anthology line, and in researching his work, I discovered that he wrote pretty much everything imaginable, from romance to mystery to westerns, as well as science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, his published works number well into the thousands—Wikipedia has an estimate of at least 1500—and I can easily believe it.
His first science fiction story, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of one of the leading general-fiction magazines, Argosy, and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of Hugo Gernsback’s first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the very first issue of Astounding included his story “Tanks”). He continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Smashing Western, as well as mainstream periodicals such as Collier’s Weekly beginning in 1936 and Esquire starting in 1939.
Jenkins was a pioneer in many now-archetypical science fiction themes. He explored parallel universe stories four years before Jack Williamson’s classic The Legion of Time came out, with “Sidewise in Time” (after which the Sidewise Award is named) in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. He also invented the “universal translator” popularized by Star Trek. And his 1946 short story “A Logic Named Joe” contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a “logic”) in fiction. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called “tanks”), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that “logics are civilization.” Not so far off from our Internet today!
Truly, he was one of the greatest visionary writers the field has ever produced.
CHAPTER 1
Trouble in the Sky
The U.S. Signal Corps announced the discovery of a new satellite of Earth in the latter part of July, and newspapers everywhere broke out in a rash of pseudo-scientific comment. The new satellite had been picked up by Signal Corps radars, in the course of experiments to work out a technique for detecting guided missiles at extreme range, while they were still rising in their high-arched flight beyond the atmosphere. The radars picked up indications of an object of appreciable size at a distance of four thousand miles, which—the moon-echo aside—was a record for radar detection.
Immediately the observation was made it was repeated, and repeated again and again, for verification. When the confirmatory fixes were computed, a course and speed for the unseen object proved it to have exact orbital speed and direction. It was circling the Earth between three and four thousand miles up, and made a complete circuit of the globe in 2 hours, 15 minutes, 32 seconds.
On the same day this discovery was released to the newspapers, Dr. David Murfree—formerly of the Bureau of Standards—mailed a check to Bud Gregory on the shores of Puget Sound. Also on the same day he received the papers of incorporation of a company to be called Ocean Products, Inc. He was in the peculiar position of having to get rich on Bud Gregory’s brains because Bud wouldn’t, and somebody had to. That same day, while Murfree was busy on the Atlantic Coast, Bud Gregory went fishing with two of his tow-headed children on the other side of the continent.
Two weeks later—in the early part of August—a second new satellite of Earth was discovered. It was closer to Earth than the first—barely 1500 miles up—and it made a circuit in 40 minutes 14 seconds. The first and farther new satellite was under continuous radar observation, now, and the fact that it was a tiny moon of Earth was completely verified, though it had not been sighted by any telescope. This newer, second satellite, of course, moved much too fast for any astronomer to hope to pick it up either visually or on a photographic plate.
* * * *
On the day of the second satellite’s announcement, Murfree assigned half the stock in Ocean Products, Inc., to a trust-fund for Bud Gregory and his family. That day, Bud Gregory stayed home and dozed beside a portable radio. It was raining too hard for him to go fishing.
The third and fourth new satellites—periods of 1 hr. 19 min., 12 sec., and 3 hr. 5 min., 42 sec. respectively—were discovered only two days apart. The fifth was found two days later, and the sixth and seventh were spotted within an hour of each other, when they were in conjunction and only five hundred miles apart, 7500 and 8000 miles up.
Murfree was very busy around this time. He had a gadget that Bud Gregory had made, and it couldn’t be patented, and it couldn’t be talked about, but it needed to be used. So he was getting Ocean Products, Inc., a mail address in New York and a stretch of ocean frontage on the Maryland coastline. He was having painful conferences with high-priced lawyers—whose point of view was as remote from that of a scientist as possible—and with low-priced electrical-installation men. He was run ragged. But Bud Gregory was sitting in the sun out on the Pacific coast, in blissful somnolence and doing nothing whatever.
Nobody suspected anything menacing in the existence of seven hitherto unsuspected and still invisible moons. Popular songs were written about them, radio programs exhaustively exploited them for gags, they were worked into three comic strips, and they headed for oblivion. But they did not reach it. When first danger was traced to them, Murfree did not hear about it for a time because he was painstakingly setting up Ocean Products, Inc., as a going concern which would pay taxes and comply with all laws, and give out no information about its dealings to anybody. Bud Gregory was living a life of placid, unambitious uselessness.
