Search Worlds Without End

Valthor looked down with mingled awe and terror at the scene below hom. Once this had been a vast network of mines; now it was being transformed into a gigantic hivelike complex deep beneath the earth.

Thousands upon thousands of the little robot men were working with their picks and shovels. Directing them were grotesque two-headed monsters with deadly atomic guns. And wandering amid the maze were green-fleshed creatures who had once been human.

And somewhere, unseen but ever-present, inspecting Valthor even as he stood here, were the all-powerful, all-knowing beings he had come to battle...

Earth rang like a great gong. Mars roared like a gigantic brass trumpet. Venus sang with the note of a huge violin. And all of them would soon explode into lifeless asteroid belts... unless the bell from infinity stopped ringing!

The menace began in the original asteroid belt itself, where one man found what he thought was the largest diamond ever discovered. It was not a diamond, but a weird crystal- and it contained the bell from infinity. Efforts to cut it unwittingly activated it and revealed its true nature- an ultimate weapon that could reduce all planets to fragments and end life down to the last tiny microbe.

Trapped in the airless caverns of one small asteroid, cut off from all outside help, a valiant group of Earthmen, Martians, and Venusians had to unite to find the bell and put a stop to its terrible threat- although no man had ever succeeded in touching it without dying!

Who would build a great civilization upon a huge crack in the world's surface? The Californians did... setting up famous cities and a myriad homes upon the line of the San Andreas fault... the Earthquake Zone of North America!

Someday, inevitably, this area must open up, must create another Atlantis, as the seas sweep in to swallow another mighty land.

In the 21st Century, law enforcement was helplessly hamstrung. Science kept developing new weapons of almost unbelievable power and flexibility...but criminals always got them first. The police and other government agencies fought back as best they could...but they were always several steps behind.

Emergency measures were needed. And where ultra-advanced systems had failed, a small group of dedicated men decided to return to more primitive methods. They fought back with raw strength and totally unpredictable tactics. They were the vigilantes. They considered themselves tools--swords in the hands of the future. They were expendable.

George Bright was one of the bravest and most clever. But he knew his enemy--the new, mysterious leader of the most ruthless criminal gang in history--had unimaginable forces at his command. Just possibly, Bright could win the battle against him. But could he ever win the war...?

This was the Venusian forest that dripped with rain, where the branches of the trees were twice as thick as the body of a man and life forms, though intelligent, were not human. One such life form, something like a cobra and something like a python, was an ally of Thal Parker, exiled Earthman, who had come to Venus on a mission of which he was far from sure.

That he wanted to get away from Earth, he knew. Earth was stifling, its government--one overwhelming bureaucracy--which strangled all independent invention and research in tons of red tape before permission could be obtained to undertake any scientific project whatever. Parker wanted to be free to work.

But there was more than this, much more.

It was tied in somehow with the mountain that Parker could see at times, and it had something to do with the strange things doctors had discovered about his brain.

There was a connection with the illegal devices he had built, and which had been stolen from him by Sam Helder, who hated him for some reason beyond Parker's understanding. And one of these devices was the means through which he communicated with the cobra-python and the titanic geths which were sure death to anyone who could not control them.

Parker was waiting-but for what?

A spaceship came out of the misty skies, and he knew it was going to crash. How did he know?

But just before that realization, he saw something which no Earthman had ever seen before, either here on Venus or on Earth: a bent, withered, twisted man walking in the sky. There was nothing beneath the gnome but empty air, and to aid him in his journey he leaned on a staff as gnarled and twisted as he was.

As he walked, there came the sound of drums.

All this had meaning. All this tied in with the riddle of why Thal Parker was here; and he had to solve that riddle, because more than his own life, and the life of the girl who had come to Venus to find him, depended on it.

Here is a strange, absorbing novel of tomorrow and a strange world where men could walk up the sky.

Table of Contents:

• 9 - When Two Worlds Meet
• 75 - Aurochs Came Walking
• 99 - On Pain of Death
• 141 - The Sound of Bugles
• 173 - The Final Frontier
• 191 - When the Spoilers Came

Conquest of the Space Sea

Beyond Pluto they faced a challenge no man could overcome.

The Galactic Breed

Outcast in space. Michael Trehearne had always been an outcast among his people on Earth. He knew he was different. He did not know how or why. Then one day, on the wind-swept coast of Brittany, a bewitchingly beautiful girl appeared & told him he had the look of the Vardda--those elite star travelers who alone could withstand the rigors of intergalactic flight.

Michael had to join them, had to find his place in the universe at last. But it would not be easy. For even when they allowed him to risk his life aboard their ship, to seal his fate upon their planet, even then, they viewed him as an outcast, a dangerous changeling who suddenly threatened them. He was a man who sooner or later would have to be destroyed!

Envoy to New Worlds

The Machiavelli of cosmic diplomacy. Collection of Retief stories.

Flight From Yesterday

Yesterday in America, tomorrow in Atlantis.

King of the Fourth Planet

King of the Fourth Planet: John Rolf fled his own guilt when he abandoned the corruption of Earth for a life of meditation on the many levels of Mars' mountain...

Cosmic Checkmate

I'll beat you the second game was the Earthman's challenge to the planet Velda, whose culture was indeed based on a complicated super-chess of skill and concentration.

The Darkness Before Tomorrow by Robert Moore Williams. Were all humans their guinea pigs?

The Ladder in the Sky by Keith Woodcott (pseudonym for John Brunner). Black magic or unimaginable super-science?

The Star Wasps

Cybernetic men versus the invisible monster.

Warlord of Kor

Backward world - or secret outpost of another galaxy?

The Towers of Toron

The Lord of the Flames was loose on Earth once more--this deadly alien entity had nearly destroyed the Empire of Toromon with its first attack. Its return now would mean a new era of chaos and conflict for the remnants of humanity. Somehow mankind must defeat this strangest of all enemies--an enemy that could be anywhere or anyone, an enemy that would reduce the human race to primitive savagery...

The Lunar Eye

Beware: Spies from space!

The Void Beyond and Other Stories

Contents:

• The Void Beyond
• Refuge for Tonight
• The Challenge
• The Weapon
• The Stubborn Men
• The Final Frontier

The Blue Atom

Who controls it, controls all.

Three to Conquer

It's the day-after-tomorrow in the USA. Wade Harper is a telepath, as far as he knows the only one in existence. He has managed to keep his paranormal abilities concealed, sure in the knowledge that his beloved government will try anything, including vivisection, to attempt to learn the source of his power. Until a chance encounter reveals to Harper that alien beings have invaded Earth --- and no one else on the planet can possibly detect them! Can he battle the menace without giving up his treasured secrecy?

Doomsday Eve

Williams' apocalyptic future is an Earth which has been at war for half-a-century, with just enough use of atomics to destroy cities and industries, but not enough to wipe out the planet--yet.

Stories are circulating in North America about strange people who seem to have even stranger abilites. Naturally the war government wants to find these people, if they exist, and conscript them. With manpower at a premium, a single intelligence agent, Kurt Zen, is sent to run down the rumors. To his astonishment, he discovers that every one of the far-fetched rumors was true, and that this band of "new people" represents normal humanity's only prayer for survival!

To the End of Time and Other Stories

Showdown on the sun's last plantet!

World of the Masterminds

Collection of short stories:

• To the End of Time - (1950)
• Where Tall Towers Gleam - (1950)
• Homeward Bound - (1949)
• When the Spoilers Came - (1952)
• Like Alarm Bells Ringing - (1947)

Contents:

• 5 - Time Tolls for Toro - (1950) - novelette
• 43 - Find Me in Eternity - (1951) - novelette
• 87 - The World of Reluctant Virgins - (1950) - shortstory
• 104 - The Soul Makers - (1950) - shortstory
• 132 - The Diamond Images - (1959) - shortstory
• 149 - When the Spoilers Came - (1952) - novelette
• 179 - To the End of Time - (1950) - shortstory
• 204 - The Metal Martyr - (1950) - shortstory
• 220 - Danger Is My Destiny - (1950) - novelette
• 268 - This Way Out - (1950) - novelette
• 300 - The Man from Space - (1957) - shortstory