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The Light Machine

The Light Machine

by Ray Cummings

The little Moving Picture Theater was hot and stuffy; Tubby found an aisle seat with his friends, near the back. For a quarter of an hour or more he sat blinking at the flickering screen. The Topical Review interested him not at all; he yawned and squeezed his fat little body lower into the hard narrow seat. The wonders of celestial space were unfo..

An Art Shop in Greenwich Village

An Art Shop in Greenwich Village

by Ray Cummings

It was a room perhaps thirty feet in length and half as broad. My first impression as I stepped over the threshold was that I had stepped across the world—in one brief instant transported from the bare, ramshackle, tumbledown Bohemianism of Greenwich Village, into the semibarbaric, Levantine splendor of some Musselman ruler. The room was carpeted w..

Tales of the clipper ships

Tales of the clipper ships

by Cicely Fox Smith

Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals—that indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands, cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white split across the knuck..

The Big Idea

The Big Idea

by Ray Cummings

Jimmy Rand came out of the wash-house that early April morning and took his place in the line of men dressed in their black, greasy mine-clothes. It was a long line—stretching past the power-house, past the big tower where the coal came tumbling down with a great clatter upon the sorting screens and into the waiting railroad flat cars beneath, unti..

The Right Thing

The Right Thing

by Ray Cummings

The girl stood quiet in the cabin doorway looking out at the brilliant, frosty night. Over Sugar Loaf the cold, glittering moon shone full; the big fir on its summit stood stark and black against the vivid blue of the star-studded sky behind, like a giant sentinel watching over the silent valley.Below her, at the bottom of the little pass, the wind..

The Laughter of Slim Malone

The Laughter of Slim Malone

by Max Brand

Time has little to do with reputation in the far West, and accordingly the name of Slim Malone grew old in the region of Appleton, and yet the owner of the name was still young.Appleton was somewhat of a misnomer, for the region had never known anything save imported apples or any other sort of fruit since the time of its birth into the history of ..

The First

The First

by Edward W. Ludwig

The city was enchanted. It was a colossal music box blaring forth a thousand chants of victory. It was a rainbow torn down from the sky and poured over the earth. It was a magic nursery through which eager-eyed children swarmed to behold a sparkling new toy.Three spacemen, three conquerors-to-be, sat stiffly in the back seat of a blue-bannered conv..

King of the Hill

King of the Hill

by James Blish

That, as we reconstructed it afterwards, is how the SV-1 affair began. It was pure luck, I suppose, that Gascoigne sent his message direct to us. Civilian Intelligence Group is rarely called into an emergency when the emergency is just being born. Usually Washington tries to do the bailing job first. Then, when Washington discovers that the boat is..