The Book of Saberhagen by Fred Saberhagen

Author:Fred Saberhagen
Format: epub
Tags: SCIFI
ISBN: Anthology
Publisher: DAW Books
Published: 1960-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

There is a doctrine among teachers (I'm not one, but I know a few) that students must be challenged to get them to put forth their best efforts. One wonders what might be accomplished if this were ever really tried.

SEVEN DOORS TO EDUCATION

The thing came down into atmosphere over Lake Michigan at a velocity that should have built shock waves before it; there were none. Radars at the Nike and fighter-interceptor sites along and near the shoreline swept their beams toward the thing in the course of their normal search routine. The hurtling electromagnetic pulses were detoured precisely around the thing, to resume on the other side their straight and echoless flight. The thing was quite unseen.

The descending mass, roughly spherical, scores of meters in diameter, slowed its plunge through the early summer night of North America. It hit the lake with hardly a splash, many kilometers from shore.

Not for the first time did it find concealment in the waters of Earth. A few people of Earth had been aware of it. Now none of them remembered it.

A June day in Chicago can be uncomfortably hot. This particular day was too miserable, in the opinion of twenty-year-old Pete Kelsey, for him to spend it all sorting mail inside the Main Post Office. Not if he could find a way out Besides the heat, it was one of those days when he just didn't feel like working. He didn't quite know why. The job was really all right, though it didn't pay too much. If he stuck with it, he would be able to retire in his early forties.

But today Kelsey's morning, spent running a canceling machine, had been generally unpleasant; and he suspected from the way the mail was running that he would be assigned in the afternoon to a dim acre of the eighth floor, where long-neglected bags and piles of low-class mail awaited a slackening of the first-class flow. It would be hot and chokingly dusty there. Kelsey decided to wangle half a day of his accumulated vacation time.

In an hour and a half he was in his rooming house on the North Side. Half an hour after that he was sitting in swimming trunks on one of the massive rocks that guard land from lake along stretches of Chicago's park-and-bench shoreline, clothing piled beside him, transistor portable blaring something with a beat.

He was almost alone, on the edge of the great city. The rocks rose like stairs for five or six tiers above where he sat near water level, shutting out the sight of green park and distant buildings. To right and left the rock rampart curved out and then away, at about a hundred yards from where he sat, putting him out of sight of the rest of the shoreline. Only two or three other people were in sight, strolling in the cool lake breeze or sunbathing.

If only some nice-looking babe would come along now, to stretch out on the rocks for some sun… well, he wouldn't hold his breath while waiting for her.

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