Philip Dick - The Science Fiction Anthology

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This collection brings together some of the most incredible sci-fi stories ever told in one convenient, high-quality, Kindle volume!
This book now contains several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure!
The Sentimentalists, by Murray Leinster
The Girls from Earth, by Frank Robinson
The Death Traps of FX-31, by Sewell Wright
Song in a minor key, by C.L. Moore
Sentry of the Sky, by Evelyn E. Smith
Meeting of the Minds, by Robert Sheckley
Junior, by Robert Abernathy
Death Wish, by Ned Lang
Dead World, by Jack Douglas
Cost of Living, by Robert Sheckley
Aloys, by R.A. Lafferty
With These Hands, by C.M. Kornbluth
What is POSAT?, by Phyllis Sterling-Smith
A Little Journey, by Ray Bradbury
Hunt the Hunter, by Kris Neville
Citizen Jell, by Michael Shaara
Operation Distress, by Lester Del Rey
Syndrome Johnny, by Charles Dye
Psychotennis, anyone?, by Lloyd Williams
Prime Difference, by Alan Nourse
Doorstep, by Keith Laumer
The Drug, by C.C. MacApp
An Elephant For the Prinkip, by L.J. Stecher
License to Steal, by Louis Newman
The Last Letter, by Fritz Lieber
The Stuff, by Henry Slesar
The Celestial Hammerlock, by Donald Colvin
Always A Qurono, by Jim Harmon
Jamieson, by Bill Doede
A Fall of Glass, by Stanley Lee
Shatter the Wall, by Sydney Van Scyoc
Transfer Point, by Anthony Boucher
Thy Name Is Woman, by Kenneth O'Hara
Twelve Times Zero, by Howard Browne
All Day Wednesday, by Richard Olin
Blind Spot, by Bascom Jones
Double Take, by Richard Wilson
Field Trip, by Gene Hunter
Larson's Luck, by Gerald Vance
Navy Day, by Harry Harrison
One Martian Afternoon, by Tom Leahy
Planet of Dreams, by James McKimmey
Prelude To Space, by Robert Haseltine
Pythias, by Frederik Pohl
Show Business, by Boyd Ellanby
Slaves of Mercury, by Nat Schachner
Sound of Terror, by Don Berry
The Big Tomorrow, by Paul Lohrman
The Four-Faced Visitors of…Ezekiel, by Arthur Orton
The Happy Man, by Gerald Page
The Last Supper, by T.D. Hamm
The One and the Many, by Milton Lesser
The Other Likeness, by James Schmitz
The Outbreak of Peace, by H.B. Fyfe
The Skull, by Philip K. Dick
The Smiler, by Albert Hernhunter
The Unthinking Destroyer, by Roger Phillips
Two Timer, by Frederic Brown
Vital Ingredient, by Charles De Vet
Weak on Square Roots, by Russell Burton
With a Vengeance, by J.B. Woodley
Zero Hour, by Alexander Blade
The Great Nebraska Sea, by Allan Danzig
The Valor of Cappen Varra, by Poul Anderson
A Bad Day for Vermin, by Keith Laumer
Hall of Mirrors, by Frederic Brown
Common Denominator, by John MacDonald
Doctor, by Murray Leinster
The Nothing Equation, by Tom Godwin
The Last Evolution, by John Campbell
A Hitch in Space, by Fritz Leiber
On the Fourth Planet, by J.F. Bone
Flight From Tomorrow, by H. Beam Piper
Card Trick, by Walter Bupp
The K-Factor, by Harry Harrison
The Lani People, by J. F. Bone
Advanced Chemistry, by Jack Huekels
Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas, by R. A. Lafferty
Keep Out, by Frederic Brown
All Cats are Gray, by Andre Norton
A Problem in Communication, by Miles J. Breuer
The Terrible Tentacles of L-472, by Sewell Peaslee Wright
Marooned Under the Sea, by Paul Ernst
The Murder Machine, by Hugh B. Cave
The Attack from Space, by Captain S. P. Meek
The Knights of Arthur, by Frederik Pohl
And All the Earth a Grave, by C.C. MacApp
Citadel, by Algis Budrys
Micro-Man, by Weaver Wright
....

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And he twined his eye stalks sentimentally about hers.

Days passed on Cetis Gamma Two. Lon Simpson cultivated his thanar fields. But he began to worry. His new power source was more than a repair for a broken-down tractor. It was valuable. It was riches! He had in it one of those basic, overwhelmingly important discoveries by which human beings have climbed up from the status of intelligent Earthbound creatures to galactic colonists—And a lot of good it had done them!

It was a basic principle for power supply that would relieve mankind permanently of the burden of fuels. The number of planets available for colonization would be multiplied. The cost of every object made by human beings would be reduced by the previous cost of power. The price of haulage from one planet to another would be reduced to a fraction. Every member of the human race would become richer as a result of the gadget now attached to Lon Simpson’s tractor. He was entitled to royalties on the wealth he was to distribute. But....

He was a thanar farmer on Cetis Gamma Two. His crop was mortgaged. He could not possibly hope to raise enough money to get back to Earth to arrange for the marketing of his invention. Especially, he could not conceivably raise money enough to take Cathy with him. He had riches, but they weren’t available. And something else might happen to ruin him at any time.

Something else did. The freezer element of his deep-freeze locker broke down. He didn’t notice it. He had a small kitchen locker in which food for week-to-week use was stored. He didn’t know anything about the deep-freeze unit that held a whole growing season’s supply of food. The food in it—all imported from Earth and very expensive—thawed, fermented, spoiled, developed evil smelling gases, and waited for an appropriate moment to reveal itself as a catastrophe.

There were other things to worry about at the time. A glacier up at Cetis Gamma Two’s polar region began to retreat, instead of growing as was normal for the season. There was a remarkable solar prominence of three days’ duration swinging around the equator of the local sun. There was a meeting of directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company, at which one of the directors pointed out that the normal curve of increase for profits was beginning to flatten out, and something had to be done to improve the financial position of the company. Ugly sun-spots appeared on the northern hemisphere of Cetis Gamma. If there had been any astronomers on the job, there would have been as much excitement as a four alarm fire. But there were no astronomers.

The greatest agitation on the second planet of Cetis Gamma Two was felt by Lon Simpson. Cathy had made friends with a married woman colonist who would chaperon her on a visit to Lon’s farm, and was coming out to visit and see the place that was to be the scene of the ineffable, unparalleled happiness she and Lon would know after they were married.

She came, she saw, she was captivated. Lon blissfully opened the door of the house she was to share. He had spent the better part of two days cleaning up so it would be fit for her to look at. Cathy entered. There was a dull, booming noise, a hissing, and a bubbling, and then a rank stench swept through the house and strangled them.

The boom, of course, was the bursting open of the deep-freeze locker from the pressure of accumulated gases within it. The smell was that of the deep-freeze contents, ten days thawed out without Lon knowing it. There are very few smells much worse than frozen fish gone very, very bad in a hot climate. If there are worse smells, they come from once-frozen eggs bursting from their shells when pressure outside them is relieved. In this case, trimmings were added by fermenting strawberries, moldy meat and badly decayed vegetables, all triumphantly making themselves known at the same instant.

Cathy gasped and choked. Lon got her out of doors, gasping himself. It was not difficult to deduce what had happened.

He opened the house windows from the outside, so the smell could go away. But he knew despair.

“I—can’t show you the house, Cathy,” he said numbly. “My locker went bad and all the food followed suit.”

“Lon!” wailed Cathy. “It’s terrible! How will you eat?”

Lon began to realize that the matter was more serious than the loss of an opportunity for a sentimental inspection of the house. He had dreamed splendidly, of late. He didn’t quite know how he was going to manage it, but since his tractor was working magnificently he had come to picture himself and Cathy in the rôle of successful colonists, zestfully growing thanar leaves for the increasing multitudes of people who needed a milligram a day.

He’d reverted to the pictured dreams in the Cetis Gamma Trading Company’s advertisements. He’d daydreamed of himself and Cathy as growing with the colony, thriving as it throve, and ultimately becoming moderately rich—in children and grandchildren, anyhow—with life stretching out before them in a sort of rosy glow. He’d negligently assumed that somehow they would also be rich from the royalties on his invention. But now he came down to reality.

His house was uninhabitable for the time being. He could continue to cultivate his fields, but he wouldn’t be able to eat. The local plant-life was not suitable for human digestion. He had to live on food imported from Earth. Now he had to buy a new stock from the Company, and it would bankrupt him.

With an invention worth more—probably—than the Cetis Gamma Company itself, if he could realize on it, he still was broke. His crop was mortgaged. If Carson learned about his substitute for a generator, the Company would immediately clamp down to get it away from him.

He took Cathy back to Cetopolis. He feverishly appealed to other colonists. He couldn’t tell them about his generator substitute. If they knew about it, in time Carson would know. If they used it, Carson would eventually get hold of a specimen, to send back to Earth for pirating by the Cetis Gamma Trading Company. All Lon could do was try desperately to arrange to borrow food to live on until his crop came in, though even then he wouldn’t be in any admirable situation.

He couldn’t borrow food in quantity. Other colonists had troubles, too. They’d give him a meal, yes, but they couldn’t refill his freezer without emptying their own. Which would compel them to buy more. Which would be charged against their crops. Which would simply hasten the day when they would become day-laborers on the Company’s thanar farm.

Lon had about two days’ food in the kitchen locker. He determined to stretch it to four. Then he’d have to buy more. With each meal, then, his hopes of freedom and prosperity—and Cathy—grew less.

Of course, he could starve....

Rhadampsicus was enormously and pleasantly interested in what went on in Cetis Gamma’s photosphere. From the ninth planet, he scanned the prominences with enthusiasm, making notes. Nodalictha tried to take a proper wifely interest in her husband’s hobby, but she could not keep it up indefinitely. She busied herself with her housekeeping. She fashioned a carpet of tufted methane fibres and put up curtains at the windows. She enlarged the garden Rhadampsicus had made, adding borders of crystallized ammonia and a sort of walkway with a hedge of monoclinic sulphur which glittered beautifully in the starlight. She knew that this was only a temporary dwelling, but she wanted Rhadampsicus to realize that she could make any place a comfortable home.

He remained absorbed in the phenomena of the local sun. One great prominence, after five days of spectacular existence, divided into two which naturally moved apart and stationed themselves at opposite sides of the sun’s equator. They continued to rotate with the sun itself, giving very much the effect of an incipient pinwheel. Two other minor prominences came into being midway between them. Rhadampsicus watched in fascination.

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