High school student, Perry Crabbe, is the school’s bully. Armed with a mullet haircut and a thick gold chain around his neck, Tintin Bailey, the charmless son of a notorious criminal, bullies international students.
Perry goes on holiday to the island of Bali. He meets small time criminal, Firas, who is in Tintin’s bad books for a deal that went wrong. Firas needs to take a mysterious parcel from Bali back to Tintin Bailey in Perth. He plans to make Perry carry it for him.
What is in the mysterious parcel? What happens when the knife-wielding locals meet Perry in a quiet alleyway? Will he make it home alive?
Space Travelers and Nothing But Space Travelers 2
Seventeen Lost Sci-Fi Short Stories from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s
Morgue Ship by Ray Bradbury
Paradise Planet by Richard S. Shaver
Asleep In Armageddon by Ray Bradbury
Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick
Defense Mech by Ray Bradbury
The Old Martians by Rog Phillips
Wreck Off Triton by Alfred Coppel
Lazarus Come Forth by Ray Bradbury
Planet of Doom by C. H. Thames
The Planet Of Illusion by Millard V. Gordon
The Last Plunge by S. J. Sackett
The Monster Maker by Ray Bradbury
Fee Of The Frontier by H. B. Fyfe
The Flight Of The Eagle by Alfred Coppel
Madmen of Mars by Erik Fennel
The Monster That Threatened The Universe by Russ Winterbotham
A Little Journey by Ray Bradbury
The Monster That Threatened the Universe by Russ Winterbotham - From Chaos a space-consuming creature reached slimy tentacles toward trembling planets. And no man of the old fighting breed remained on effete Earth to battle the invulnerable monster.
Limio hugged the dying fires of Chaos. He was not cold, for the fires that burned in the center of the cold star were not dead, only dying. But they were the source of life to the monster who lived in the depths of a black hole of space.
The Black Hole, about thirty degrees from the solar quadrant in the terrestrial galaxy, was not dark, but twilight to Limio, whose eyes were sensitive to infra-red radiation. These eyes, hundreds of them floating on huge cranial bumps that dotted the thousands of miles of his massive body, caught the ruddy glow of a rocket ship entering The Black Hole.
Limio grunted. These iron creatures were hard to crack, but inside their hulls were juicy tidbits of carbon and oxygen in various combinations. It had seemed to Limio that these tasty morsels were alive; that they might even possess intelligence. Of course, it would be hard to conceive of anything so small having much intelligence, but Limio had run across strange things in the universe in his millions of years of existence.
Limio had come to Chaos a single spore. He had grown into a slimy, reptilian, nauseating mass, the supreme hideosity in a warp of creation. His body lacked form, except as a tenuous syrupy blanket covering a fourth of the surface of Chaos. Here and there in the skin of this monster were toothed craters ready to devour any carbon molecule that might fall from space. Food was not important to Limio, for it only made him grow. The energy of the inner fires of Chaos supplied the needs of his existence. He ate simply to destroy, for Limio wanted no competitive form of life on Chaos. Competition might mean death and Limio loved his immortality.
Rescue Mission by Robert Silverberg - Snaring both Earthmen in a mind-web was easy for the mutant telepath. But once you've caught your prey—how do you get rid of them?
Rick Mason's ship was still high over Mordarga, coming in for a landing, when the cry for help sounded in his audio phones.
Rick frowned, reached to the control panel to turn up the amplification—then realized that the voice had not come over the audio after all. It had spoken in his mind.
Help! Rick, they've caught me!
There was urgency in the mental cry. Instantly, Mason sized up the situation.
It was his partner, Klon Darra, the Venusian—the other half of this mentally-attuned Solar System intelligence team. Klon Darra was in trouble!
He focussed his mental energies and replied: I read you, Klon Darra. What's the problem?
The response was blurred and indistinct, as if the Venusian were laboring under great mental strain. I ... landed on schedule. Fell into hands of ... ruler. In prison. Going to be tortured. I....
Mason struggled to keep his attention on his descending spaceship while picking up the Venusian's fading mental voice. Go ahead, Klon Darra. I hear you.
They're going to torture me. Help me, Mason. Help!
Where are you? Mason asked.
Dungeons of the main palace, Mordarga City. Hurry, Rick. There's not much time!
Jonah of the Jove-Run by Ray Bradbury - They hated this little beat-up old guy. Even if his crazy cosmic brain could track a meteor clear across the Galaxy, why did he have to smash the super-sensitive detectors?
Nibley stood in the changing shadows and sounds of Marsport, watching the great supply ship TERRA being entered and left by a number of officials and mechanics. Something had happened. Something was wrong. There were a lot of hard faces and not much talk. There was a bit of swearing and everybody looked up at the night sky of Mars, waiting.
But nobody came to Nibley for his opinion or his help. He stood there, a very old man, with a slack-gummed face and eyes like the little bubbly stalks of crayfish looking up at you from a clear creek. He stood there fully neglected. He stood there and talked to himself.
'They don't want me, or need me,' he said. 'Machines are better, nowadays. Why should they want an old man like me with a taste for Martian liquor? They shouldn't! A machine isn't old and foolish, and doesn't get drunk!'
Way out over the dead sea bottoms, Nibley sensed something moving. Part of himself was suddenly awake and sensitive. His small sharp eyes moved in his withered face. Something inside of his small skull reacted and he shivered. He knew. He knew that what these men were watching and waiting for would never come.
Nibley edged up to one of the astrogators from the TERRA. He touched him on the shoulder. 'Say,' he said. 'I'm busy,' said the astrogator. 'I know,' said Nibley, 'but if you're waiting for that small repair rocket to come through with the extra auxiliary asteroid computator on it, you're wasting your time.'
'Like hell,' said the astrogator, glaring at the old man. 'That repair rocket's got to come through, and quick; we need it. It'll get here.'
Human Is by Philip K. Dick - She noticed the change in her husband -- but she had married for better or worse!
Jill Herrick's blue eyes filled with tears. She gazed at her husband in unspeakable horror. 'You're — you're hideous!' she wailed.
Lester Herrick continued working, arranging heaps of notes and graphs in precise piles.
'Hideous,' he stated, 'is a value judgment. It contains no factual information.' He sent a report tape on Centauran parasitic life whizzing through the desk scanner. 'Merely an opinion. An expression of emotion, nothing more.'
Jill stumbled back to the kitchen. Listlessly, she waved her hand to trip the stove into activity. Conveyor belts in the wall hummed to life, hurrying the food from the underground storage lockers for the evening meal.
She turned to face her husband one last time. 'Not even a little while?' she begged. 'Not even —'
'Not even for a month. When he comes you can tell him. If you haven't the courage, I'll do it. I can't have a child running around here. I have too much work to do. This report on Betelgeuse XI is due in ten days.' Lester dropped a spool on Fomalhautan fossil implements into the scanner. 'What's the matter with your brother? Why can't he take care of his own child?'
Jill dabbed at swollen eyes. 'Don't you understand? I want Gus here! I begged Frank to let him come. And now you —'
'I'll be glad when he's old enough to be turned over to the Government.' Lester's thin face twisted in annoyance. 'Damn it, Jill, isn't dinner ready yet? It's been ten minutes! What's wrong with that stove?'
Six Frightened Men by Robert Silverberg - It was an unexplored planet and anything could happen—yet none of us expected to face a creature impossible to fight, let alone kill....
You put your life on the line when you join the Exploratory Wing of the Space Corps. They tell you that when you sign up. The way they told it to me, it went like this:
'You'll be out there on alien worlds where no human being has ever set foot—worlds which may or may not have been inhabited by hostile alien creatures. You take your life in your hands every time you make a planetfall out there. Still interested?'
'That's old stuff,' I said. 'You don't think I'd join up if it was an old ladies' tea party, do you?'
Which was how I happened to be crouching behind a fantastically-sculptured spiralling rock out on the yellow wind-blasted desert of Pollux V, huddling there with the fierce sweep of sand against my faceplate, looking at the monster that barred my path.
The thing was at least sixty feet tall and all eyes and mouth. The mouth yawned, showing yellow daggers a foot long. As for the eyes—well, they burned with the cold luminosity of an intelligent and inimical being.
I didn't know what the thing was. One minute I'd been examining an interesting rock formation, a second later I was hiding behind it, watching the ravening thing that had appeared out of nowhere.
Other members of the expedition were sprawled here and there on the desert too. I could see Max Feld, our paleontologist, curled in a tight plump little ball under an outcropping of weathered limestone, and there was Roy Laurence, the biochemist, flat on his stomach peering at the thing incredulously.
Back behind me were three others—Don Forster, Leo Mickens, Clyde Hamner. That made six. The two remaining members of the team, Medic Howard Graves and Anthropologist Lyman Donaldson, were back at the ship.
A Little Journey by Ray Bradbury - She'd paid good money to see the inevitable... and then had to work to make it happen!
There were two important things—one, that she was very old; two, that Mr. Thirkell was taking her to God. For hadn't he patted her hand and said: 'Mrs. Bellowes, we'll take off into space in my rocket, and go to find Him together.'
And that was how it was going to be. Oh, this wasn't like any other group Mrs. Bellowes had ever joined. In her fervor to light a path for her delicate, tottering feet, she had struck matches down dark alleys, and found her way to Hindu mystics who floated their flickering, starry eyelashes over crystal balls. She had walked on the meadow paths with ascetic Indian philosophers imported by daughters-in-spirit of Madame Blavatsky. She had made pilgrimages to California's stucco jungles to hunt the astrological seer in his natural habitat. She had even consented to signing away the rights to one of her homes in order to be taken into the shouting order of a temple of amazing evangelists who had promised her golden smoke, crystal fire, and the great soft hand of God coming to bear her home.
None of these people had ever shaken Mrs. Bellowes' faith, even when she saw them sirened away in a black wagon in the night, or discovered their pictures, bleak and unromantic, in the morning tabloids. The world had roughed them up and locked them away because they knew too much, that was all.
And then, two weeks ago, she had seen Mr. Thirkell's advertisement in New York City:
COME TO MARS!
Stay at the Thirkell Restorium for one week. And then, on into space on the greatest adventure life can offer!
Send for Free Pamphlet: 'Nearer My God To Thee.' Excursion rates. Round trip slightly lower.
Space-Lane of No-Return by George Whittington - You were bored—keeping the endless, dull space-lanes clear. You wanted excitement, danger, to see the weird planets of the System. You wanted—And then it happened, all the swift, blazing danger of the void—and you found yourself being blasted out of existence.
'Asteroid fishing' was no job for men who joined the Inter-Planetary Patrol with the lure of distant space frontiers in their heart, Nord Holber told himself bitterly.
Your two-man Patrol ship hung less than twenty degrees off the ecliptic, with sharp, hard starlight from the spangled jet mantle of space glinting against the top and sides of its maroon plastic hull. Below, the asteroids rushed through their mad orbits like the vengeful ghosts of shattered planets and satellites.
Smaller fragments danced through weird paths above the main body. They were the hazard that forced space liners to arc far above the impassable Belt on the run between Jupiter's moons and the inner planets: and, since you were a fledgeling Patrol Officer, fresh from Federation University, you wasted the energy that boiled in your blood hunting these fragments, yanking them out of space!
'It's fun,' Mike Doren admitted, as though reading his partner's thought. 'Like shark fishing. But it's not what I joined the Patrol to do.'
Nord Holber's answering smile softened the strength a firm chin and thin, straight nose gave to his long oval face. 'More like mine sweeping in ancient times, Mike,' he said quietly—as though the dispassionate menace of the inanimate chunks of matter they hunted could answer the call for high adventure! 'One of those things could make a wreck of this ship—as easily as it could a liner.'
Against that possibility, they wore space suits, and, under his transparent helmet, Nord's grey eyes swept the side view screens for any fragments they'd missed on the way down.
Lost Sci-Fi Books 61 thru 65 - Five Lost Sci-Fi Short Stories from the 1940s, 50s and 60s
A Little Journey by Ray Bradbury - She'd paid good money to see the inevitable ... and then had to work to make it happen!
Tony and The Beetles by Philip K. Dick - A ten-year-old boy grows up fast when history catches up with the human race.
Piper In The Woods by Philip K. Dick - Earth maintained an important garrison on Asteroid Y-3. Now suddenly it was imperiled with a biological impossibility—men becoming plants!
The Monster That Threatened The Universe by Russ Winterbotham - From Chaos a space-consuming creature reached slimy tentacles toward trembling planets. And no man of the old fighting breed remained on effete Earth to battle the invulnerable monster.
Madmen of Mars by Erik Fennel - Why do the Martians drink red wine, swagger about, spout vile poetry and fight endless duels with each other? How did Terence Michael Burke change their minds about invading the Earth?
What Can Possibly Stop an Army of Millions?
Journee is not only a mouse but a princess who loves adventure, especially when she has them alongside her best friends, Mr. Toad, Mr. Owl, and Mr. Steed. Not long after their very first escapade together, finding the legendary Pond of Reflection, the four companions find themselves in yet another wild exploit, that is decidedly dangerous and threatens the entire kingdom.
On one lovely fall day, the friends have no idea what is in store for them when they discover a furry blob on top of a boulder, a rock hyrax, and learn of a message for Journee’s father, the Great Mouse King. Mr. Badger's message warns the king of a formidable army of locusts gathering on the kingdom's northern border in the Great Plains by the sea. The king and his Council devise an unlikely plan to not only help the locusts but hopefully thwart the significant threat they pose to the kingdom. This plan's success will require the help of every kingdom animal, great and small, and a very special gift of the rock hyraxes, who live in the crags of the High Western Mountain.
This adventure story is inspired by the Biblical Proverb 30:24-28 (NKJV) and communicates the morals of helping your neighbor, that power can come in small packages, and the effectiveness of working together.
