Fred Hoyle - Element 79

There was no point this time in staying within close reach of the community. Joe headed for the interior country, moving steadily and confidently. On the fourth day he crossed the first of the mountain ranges. In the valley below he could see woods beside a shining river. He made his way downhill with a lighter heart than he ever remembered, the boy who was the best intellect his community had produced in a dozen generations, the boy with the courage to turn his back on ten thousand years of progress. Like another boy in distant antiquity, condemned to the wilderness, robbed of his girl, he would return one day to be a scourge to the whole world.

Fred Hoyle, later Sir Fred (1915-2001) at the time of publication was the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, a staff member of Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, and Visiting Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. His scientific studies included Frontiers of Astronomy and The Nature of the Universe (the book that introduced the [then famous but in the 21st century less so] steady state theory of creation). Among his works of science fiction are The Black Cloud and Ossian's Ride .

Although Fred Hoyle was an author of some renown as well as being a rather famous scientist, as of January 2014 Element 79 appears to have been out of print since about 1972 and was never published in electronic form. In those 40-odd years only two of the stories have been anthologised, none more recently than 1986.

The book on your screen is based on the text of a medium-quality conversion of a widely available PDF file containing images of the book’s pages. This version was created as an ePUB from the ground up and was fairly thoroughly proofread against a copy of the same (1967 New American Library hardback “Book Club”) edition.

The editor has endeavoured to provide the public with a copy that can pass as near-retail grade and, having no delusions regarding the legality of the enterprise, asserts no rights. The work’s copyright holders are encouraged to release the work into the public domain earlier than the year 2072 and/or to use this copy as the basis for an affordably priced electronic edition. Readers are encouraged to acquire such an affordably priced legal copy if and when one becomes available.

Copyright © 1967 by Fred Hoyle

Cover design by Stanislaw Zagorski

Zoomen was previously published in the March 1967 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction .

Blackmail was previously published in the February 1967 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction .

“Battered old box” refers to the leather-and-pine box used by most Chancellors of the Exchequer from 1860 until 2010 during the announcement of the government's budget plan. By the 1960s it had a famously well-worn appearance.