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The year is 2136. Terra and Centaurus are locked in a perpetual cold war. Each offensive plan is overcome by a defensive plan so quickly that the actual offensive and defensive devices are never even completed before being rendered obsolete. SRB machines constantly calculate and recalculate the odds of one side winning a war. The odds shift ceaselessly. But the situation changes when a Polish scientist named Sherikov comes up with a plan for a new missile based on a failed attempt to master faster-than-the-speed-of-light travel by a man named Hedge, who was killed when his FTL ship returned from another dimension into space already occupied by matter. This gives Sherikov the idea for the FTL missile, Icarus. This puts the odds in Terra’s favor, so they mobilize for war as Icarus nears completion. Meanwhile, a research time bubble is manually called back from 1913 and it brings a fix-it man named Thomas Cole from the past. He is the variable man and this variable throws the SRB machines into confusion. They cannot account for this variable in their analysis of the odds for victory. Cole’s hands can run over things and give him a kind of intuitive, tactile understanding, not of how they work so much as how they should work. He “repairs” a broken children’s toy so that it actually can send messages light years away. Sherikov needs Cole to wire the control turret globe for Icarus. So far, no one has been able to do so. Reinhart and Sherikov have been engaged in a power struggle and Reinhart wants Cole dead. But Sherikov keeps him alive and he fixes the globe. Reinhart attacks Sherikov’s lab in the Urals, and Cole is badly injured by a phosphorous bomb. Icarus is launched but does not explode near Centaurus. Cole actually fixed it to its original specifications as a means of FTL travel, a tool that shifts Terra from war to exploration and an escape from empire. Reinhart is deposed, and Cole will be sent back to his own time, as Sherikov promised, but not before working with Sherikov’s schematics for a clever device that eliminates the chance for overly powerful people like Reinhart by enabling instantaneous direct democracy on all issues, by enacting the will of the majority as it forms. The story ends on this optimistic note.

Professor Hardy, a mathematician, teaches his students about Zeno’s paradox through the story of a frog unable to reach the top of a well because he will always have half of the previous distance left to go. Professor Grote, a philosopher, disagrees with Hardy, believing that the frog will reach the top of the well. They rig up an experiment. A tube is closed at one end, which becomes hot. At the other end is a force field. The closer the frog gets to the force field, the smaller he becomes by half, thus doubling the distance he must travel to reach a photon beam that will shut off the force field. But during the experiment the frog becomes so small he seems to disappear. Grote enters the tube to investigate and Hardy locks him in, making him the frog of a new experiment. He, too, keeps getting smaller as the experiment progresses. Meanwhile, Hardy announces his victory to his students. Then a frog appears and a student says it validates his theory that the frog would become so small it would fall through the molecules of the tube, then regain its normal size in the absence of the force field. An angry full-sized Grote awaits Hardy outside. But he is most perturbed by the fact that the paradox remains unsolved. He suggests to Hardy that they come up with a new experiment that will work, and the story ends.

An unnamed man scurries about terrified of insect informers. The ants are gods. They inhabited the earth before man came from another planet; it has been war between them ever since. The ants have been kept at bay until now. But the spiders, along with the birds and a few others, oppose the ants. There is a chance they may be able to save man … in general that is, as a species. Our poor unnamed character, however, is doomed.

Doc Labyrinth is concerned that civilization is on the brink of destruction, as was the Roman Empire during its period of decline. What he most dreads losing is music, so he designs a machine to transform musical scores into animals so that they might survive the coming changes. But when the creatures are released into the wild, they adapt in order to defend themselves. Some, like the wagner animal, attack others. When the Doc puts a bach bug back through the machine to hear what a fugue sounds like, it is now cacophony. The experiment fails. As the narrator drives away, he sees the beethoven beetle wall himself away from the world inside a mud structure.

A crew of three visits asteroids to prospect for minerals. They come across an asteroid with all the necessary conditions to sustain life, yet is does not. They are preparing to send some pigs (at one point referred to as “hamsters” p. 132) to the surface to see if it is safe when they are hit with a blast of radiation. They evolve several million years in a moment, gainer greater tactile and cognitive powers, but lose their hair and become physically weaker. Blake becomes a megalomaniac and wants to return to earth and conquer it, then the whole universe, under the guise of helping humanity. He kills Sylvia with a disk weapon he has invented. They are heading back to Terra, but Blake’s plans are threatened when five embodiments of pure energy arrive. They kill Blake and resurrect Sylvia. They are the hamsters/pigs, who have evolved much further than the humans, due to the fact that they were the first to feel the radiation and that they had, evolutionarily speaking, much further to go. Sylvia and Eller are returned to their normal states by the advanced hamsters, who have no interest in the human race, whose potential for advancement, not to mention ethical behavior, is considerably less than their own.

A young patrolman from Asteroid Y-3 believes he is a plant. He sits in the sun all day and sleeps when it is dark, refusing to do any of his duties. The syndrome spreads and Dr. Harris investigates. He interrogates these “plants” with the shock box and learns that they were taught to be plants by “the Pipers.” Harris goes to Asteroid Y-3 to find these Pipers. He sees a native who says she will lead him to these Pipers. She has the same supple movements as the plants. Harris returns to the base commander and says he has solved the problem but not cured it. He sees the Pipers as a psychological projection, allowing the plants to refuse work and to lounge about as primitives would have before the speed and duties of modern society changed us all. Harris says he will start them all on therapy in the morning. Then he covers the floor of his room with nice warm dirt and settles down to sleep. He too is now a plant.

In order to defeat an enemy whose living, intelligent mines seem impossible to fight effectively,Terra implants a spaceship with the brain of an old professor. They think that the disembodied brain will have no consciousness; they are wrong. The professor thinks and consequently retains his human identity despite his inanimate embodiment. His hatred of war causes him to try an experiment. He will be like the god of a new world, peopled by Phil Kramer and his wife (separated) Delores and then their offspring. They will be divorced from the Terran customs and traditions that the professor so strongly feels are the root causes of conflict. The question is, is war a learned habit or an ingrained human instinct.

It has been eight years since war broke out between the Americans and the Soviets. The surface world is radioactive and unlivable. “Leadies” conduct the war up above while all the humans live deep underground, producing war materials nonstop and following news of the progress of the war. They subsist on artificial light and food. The humans must rely on the leadies for information on surface conditions since they themselves cannot visit the surface because of the high levels of radioactivity. Then a non-radioactive leady visits some officials below and they become suspicious. On surfacing, they find the beautiful old world still intact, with all the old animals, plants, etc. The leadies had analyzed the war they had been created to fight by proxy and found it pointless and stopped it. They are caretakers of the world until the Americans and Soviets can transcend war and form a global society based on cooperation and mutual understanding. The Americans immediately try to restart the war but are stopped by the leadies. Ultimately, they join a few Russians in living together in a village, and the story ends on an optimistic note with a glance forward toward all mankind will be able to achieve when they work together instead of against one another.

Conger is a hunter serving a prison term for some sort of illegal trading. The authorities need his special skills. They want him to go into the past and kill the “founder” of a non-violent sect of quasi-Christians. They show him the skull for identification. He takes the skull and a gun into the past. First he goes to just after when the founder died and researches the papers. Then he travels further back to kill him before he can deliver his message. Ultimately, he holds the skull next to his own face and realizes that he is the founder. He gives the assembled crowd a brief paradox, then waits to die, knowing he will be seen to have risen from the dead in “the near future.” By a neat accident, the authorities of his own time have brought about the very thing they had hoped to prevent.

Seeing evidence of what looks like atomic fission on a large scale, a planet sends a ship and small crew to investigate this hitherto unknown place. Nuclear war has destroyed the entire planet. The crew members repeatedly show complete bewilderment that two peoples on the same planet would fight one another. Their ship is hit by atomic shells just when it flies close to the ruins of a city. The captain is injured and later dies. Nasha, his dark-haired girl assistant leads a search party to explore the ruins of the planet. They find a giant gun that launches nuclear warheads at anything that moves close to the surface of the planet. As in the old myths, it is the “dragon” that guards the treasure. The treasure turns out to be primarily the former society’s literature, art, etc. They decide to bring it back to their planet to study it, but first must disable the gun, which they do easily by following the universal myth that describes the dragon’s soft underbelly—its vulnerable spot. Having disabled the gun, they repair their ship and start back toward home, where they will prepare to return for the now unguarded “treasure.” As they leave, a red light goes off in the damaged gun sending a signal that summons a series of repair carts to bring parts and new warheads to the gun.The gun will be ready for them when they return. Like similar stories from the era, it is largely cold-war parable, but there is a good deal more going on.

Captain Franco, Peterson, and the rest of the crew are collecting animals on Mars, presumably to eat, as there is talk of their need for the creatures and the desirability of organizing hunts. Peterson personally buys a pig-like creature called a wub. The wub would strongly prefer not to be eaten and says so. He prefers discussion, eating, and relaxation. He is philosophical. Peterson enjoys talking with him, but Franco’s desire for wub-pork is too great. The wub insists that Franco look him in the eye while killing him. Everyone glumly sits around the table, scarcely eating, while Franco enjoys his meal, especially the wub flesh, very much. It soon becomes clear that the ancient creature who had inhabited the body of the wub and had always wanted to taste the flesh of the wub, now inhabits Franco’s body. Presumably they traded places during the slaughter. He continues in his passion for food and philosophical discussion, shocking Peterson as the truth becomes apparent to him.

*

A group of little metal wind up soldiers plan to take over the “adult” world by getting adults to buy them for children. One soldier, “My Lord,” gains control over a young boy and orders him to go to a toy store and pick up a package of weapons. The plans of the toy soldiers are stymied when the boy’s toy teddy bear, pig, and rabbit tear the soldiers to pieces. They had already neatly dispatched a few other toy soldiers in the neighborhood. There’s a nice bit of empathetic commentary on the life of children—it is easy for the little soldiers to control them, because their whole lives consist of being ordered around by parents, teachers, etc.

*

The Cardossi family dog Boris is not barking. The Roogs may appear to be garbage collectors to the foolish eyes of humans, but their sinister glances at the bedroom windows where people are sleeping suggest evil intentions. So far, the brimming galvanized steel trash pails, or offering urns, have staved off the inevitable. In truth, only the diligent “guardian” Boris keeps the Cardossis from certain death at the hands of the Roogs. Too bad the neighbors complain so much about the warnings he barks out.

*

Robert Benton lives in a dystopian future state where the main concern is stability, and a machine with that name and a group of Controllers help to insure it by disappearing recalcitrant or “backsliding” citizens. A German had stated that mankind had reached its peak; there could be no more progress, so society opted for stabilization.

In the City of Lightness, people don wings and fly around for entertainment. It seems to be what we would call an information economy where people actually do very little.

Benton is called to the Controller’s Main Office and told his invention was rejected. But he does not remember having invented anything. He takes the model and plans and returns home.

The invention turns out to be a time machine that takes Benton to the past where a glass-globed city calls out to him. He picks up the small globe despite warnings from a “guardian” against evil things. The globe tells him how to operate the time machine to return, which he does, stopping just early enough before the time he left to drop off “his invention” at the Controller’s Office; thus his second visit to the office is actually his first and vice versa.

The Controllers figure out what is happening and they go to Benton’s house to find the threat to stability. One Controller recalls a story of an evil city encased in glass and tries to take the globe from Benton. Benton breaks it, releasing the evil city.

In the end, he becomes a slave to machines, feeding them and servicing them. But is this really that different from the society it replaced?

Photo Credit: Martin Kimeldorf’s Pixel Playground