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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He saw light from another flashlight. Sorensen, badly out of breath, had joined him. The jungle had ripped and clawed at him, but he still had his rifle, flashlight and direction finder.

Oro was scratching furiously at a bush. There was a long flash of lightning, and in it they saw the Quedak.

Drake realized, in those final moments, that the rain had stopped. The lightning had stopped, too. He dropped the direction finder. With the flashlight in one hand and his revolver in the other, he tried to take aim at the Quedak, who was moving, who had jumped—

To Sorensen’s neck, just above the right collarbone.

Sorensen raised his hands, then lowered them again. He turned toward Drake, raising his rifle. His face was perfectly calm. He looked as though his only purpose in life was to kill Drake.

Drake fired from less than two feet away. Sorensen spun with the impact, dropped his rifle and fell.

Drake bent over him, his revolver ready. He saw that he had fired accurately. The bullet had gone in just above the right collarbone. It was a bad wound. But it had been much worse for the Quedak, who had been in the direct path of the bullet. All that was left of the Quedak was a splatter of black across Sorensen’s chest.

Drake applied hasty first aid and hoisted Sorensen to his shoulders. He wondered what he would have done if the Quedak had been standing above Sorensen’s heart, or on his throat, or on his head.

He decided it was better not to think about that.

He started back to camp, with his dog trotting along beside him.

Junior, by Robert Abernathy

“Junior!” bellowed Pater.

Junior! ” squeaked Mater, a quavering echo.

“Strayed off again—the young idiot! If he’s playing in the shallows, with this tide going out....” Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror.

No sign of Junior.

Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, out of sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began.

“Oh, oh,” sobbed Mater. “He’s lost. He’s swum into the abyss and been eaten by a sea monster.” Her slender stem rippled and swayed on its base and her delicate crown of pinkish tentacles trailed disheveled in the pull of the ebbtide.

“Pish, my dear!” said Pater. “There are no sea monsters. At worst,” he consoled her stoutly, “Junior may have been trapped in a tidepool.”

“Oh, oh,” gulped Mater. “He’ll be eaten by a land monster.”

“There ARE no land monsters!” snorted Pater. He straightened his stalk so abruptly that the stone to which he and Mater were conjugally attached creaked under them. “How often must I assure you, my dear, that WE are the highest form of life?” (And, as for his world and geologic epoch, he was quite right.)

“Oh, oh,” gasped Mater.

Her spouse gave her up. “JUNIOR!” he roared in a voice that loosened the coral along the reef.

Round about, the couple’s bereavement had begun attracting attention. In the thickening dusk, tentacles paused from winnowing the sea for their owners’ suppers, stalked heads turned curiously here and there in the colony. Not far away, a threesome of maiden aunts, rooted en brosse to a single substantial boulder, twittered condolences and watched Mater avidly.

“Discipline!” growled Pater. “That’s what he needs! Just wait till I—”

“Now, dear—” began Mater shakily.

“Hi, folks!” piped Junior from overhead.

His parents swiveled as if on a single stalk. Their offspring was floating a few fathoms above them, paddling lazily against the ebb; plainly he had just swum from some crevice in the reef nearby. In one pair of dangling tentacles he absently hugged a roundish stone, worn sensuously smooth by pounding surf.

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”

“Nowhere,” said Junior innocently. “Just playing hide-and-go-sink with the squids.”

“With the other polyps,” Mater corrected him primly. She detested slang.

Pater was eyeing Junior with ominous calm. “And where,” he asked, “did you get that stone?”

Junior contracted guiltily. The surfstone slipped from his tentacles and plumped to the sea-floor in a flurry of sand. He edged away, stammering, “Well, I guess maybe ... I might have gone a little ways toward the beach....”

“You guess! When I was a polyp,” said Pater, “the small fry obeyed their elders, and no guess about it!”

“Now, dear—” said Mater.

“And no spawn of mine,” Pater warmed to his lecture, “is going to flout my words! Junior—COME HERE!”

Junior paddled cautiously around the homesite, just out of tentacle-reach. He said in a small voice, “I won’t.”

“DID YOU HEAR ME?”

“Yes,” admitted Junior.

The neighbors stared. The three maiden aunts clutched one another with muted shrieks, savoring beforehand the language Pater would now use.

But Pater said “Ulp!”—no more.

“Now, dear,” put in Mater quickly. “We must be patient. You know all children go through larval stages.”

“When I was a polyp ...” Pater began rustily. He coughed out an accidentally inhaled crustacean, and started over: “No spawn of mine....” Trailing off, he only glared, then roared abruptly, “SPRAT!”

“I won’t!” said Junior reflexively and backpaddled into the coral shadows of the reef.

“That wallop,” seethed Pater, “wants a good polyping. I mean....” He glowered suspiciously at Mater and the neighbors.

“Dear,” soothed Mater, “didn’t you notice ?”

“Of course, I.... Notice what?”

“What Junior was doing ... carrying a stone. I don’t suppose he understands why , just yet, but....”

“A stone? Ah, uh, to be sure, a stone. Why, my dear, do you realize what this means ?”

Pater was once more occupied with improving Mater’s mind. It was a long job, without foreseeable end—especially since he and his helpmeet were both firmly rooted for life to the same tastefully decorated homesite (garnished by Pater himself with colored pebbles, shells, urchins and bits of coral in the rather rococo style which had prevailed during Pater’s courting days as a free-swimming polyp).

“Intelligence, my dear,” pronounced Pater, “is quite incompatible with motility. Just think—how could ideas congeal in a brain shuttled hither and yon, bombarded with ever-changing sense-impressions? Look at the lower species, which swim about all their lives, incapable of taking root or thought! True Intelligence, my dear—as distinguished from Instinct, of course—pre-supposes the fixed viewpoint!” He paused.

Mater murmured, “Yes, dear,” as she always did obediently at this point.

Junior undulated past, swimming toward the abyss. He moved a bit heavily now; it was growing hard for him to keep his maturely thickening afterbody in a horizontal posture.

“Just look at the young of our own kind,” said Pater. “Scatter-brained larvae, wandering greedily about in search of new stimuli. But, praise be, they mature at last into sensible sessile adults. While yet the unformed intellect rebels against the ending of care-free polyphood, Instinct, the wisdom of Nature, instructs them to prepare for the great change!”

He nodded wisely as Junior came gliding back out of the gloom of deep water. Junior’s tentacles clutched an irregular basalt fragment which he must have picked up down the rubble-strewn slope. As he paddled slowly along the rim of the reef, the adult anthozoans located directly below looked up and hissed irritable warnings.

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