The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction : First Series by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas (ed)

Author:Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas (ed) [Boucher, Anthony & McComas, J. Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Anthology
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1954-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

P. M. HUBBARD

There are no limits to the ever-expanding universe of science fiction; we fully expect to see it shortly appearing in Better Homes and Gardens and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. The latest market to succumb to the invasion from outer space is that backbone (or at least funny bone) of Empire, Punch; and the delightful result is, as you might expect, like nothing yet seen on this side of the Atlantic.

Manuscript Found in a Vacuum

On the fifth day of September in the Year of Our Lord, 2259, I being then in the command of His Majesty’s ship Supersonic, a frigate of forty rockets and fourth of her name in His Majesty’s fleet, and she being then upon the Venus station, my crew did mutiny and put me off in the long boat, with victuals and oxygen for but ten days, to perish or survive as space should suffer me: and little indeed cared they, and would have made my scanty provision still less but for the intercession of the ship’s cook, who, being but a simple biochemist, nor even of unmixed blood (but having the green hair and telescopic eyes of the Terro-Martian), had yet more charity than they all. I had done this fellow some service, having given him refuge aboard when the officers of his own planet (his mother was a Martian, of the Canal Zone, his father being, as I suppose, a man of our armies during the late war) would have vaporized him for smuggling ashore a bottle of cow’s milk, which is much prized among them, in the oxygen tank of his helmet: and good cause had I now to be glad I had done so. For I went eight days in space; but upon the eighth night, my oxygen being all but spent, and for the rest having, as we say, neither protein nor proton, I heard breakers ahead, and found myself shortly in much atmosphere (though of what kind I could not tell), and soon, my boat being swept on by a strong current of gravity, I knew I was near land.

And now my boat, having no longer fuel with which it might make way in such an air, was at the mercy of the current, and was like to dash itself upon the land, and me with it: so that being resolved to stake all upon the venture, I cast myself into the air, as we say, to fall or fly. The air was, I found, tolerably oxygenated and, with some adjustment of my lung-filter, sweet enough to breath. I am accounted a good flyer, having from my youth up been accustomed to such exercise (my father being a ferry pilot on the lunar service); and now I flew strongly and came safely to land, though with little enough about me save the space-skin and helmet in which I stood upright.

The sphere upon which I found myself is small and its climate equable. From such observations as I

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