Tag: 1959

The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley (Playboy, September 1959)1 opens with Mr Wayne passing a pile of rubble and coming to a tumbledown building at the end, The Store of the Worlds. Inside, Wayne meets the proprietor, Mr Tompkins, who can supposedly transport people (by means of the rusty hypodermic needle on the table, and “certain gadgets” in the back of the store) to the world of their deepest desires. Tomkins gives a “Many Worlds” explanation to Wayne:

“What happens then?” Mr. Wayne asked.
“Your mind, liberated from its body, is able to choose from the countless probability worlds which the earth casts off in every second of its existence.”
Grinning now, Tompkins sat up in his rocking chair and began to show signs of enthusiasm.
“Yes, my friend, though you might not have suspected it, from the moment this battered earth was born out of the sun’s fiery womb, it cast off its alternate-probability worlds. Worlds without end, emanating from events large and small; every Alexander and every amoeba creating worlds, just as ripples will spread in a pond no matter how big or how small the stone you throw. Doesn’t every object cast a shadow? Well, my friend, the earth itself is four-dimensional; therefore it casts three-dimensional shadows, solid reflections of itself, through every moment of its being. Millions, billions of earths! An infinity of earths! And your mind, liberated by me, will be able to select any of these worlds and live upon it for a while.”

The rest of this lengthy but absorbing setup goes on to cover the cost of the service, which is very high, and the health implications (a year in the world of desire costs ten years of the traveller’s life as there is a strain on the nervous system). Then, when Wayne asks if the transition can be made permanent, Tompkins says he is researching that possibility using the money he gets from selling the service.
Wayne eventually tells Tompkins that he needs to give it some thought, and the story cuts to his journey home to Long Island. There we see that Wayne has a wife called Janet, a son called Tommy, and a comfortable middle-class existence. Over the following days, and against the background of his work on Wall Street and a sailing trip with his son Tommy, Wayne thinks about Mr Tompkins, The Store of the Worlds, and the sort of world he might desire.
The final scene of the story cuts back to the store, where Wayne is waking up. Tompkins asks him if he is okay and whether or not he wants a refund. Wayne replies that the experience was quite satisfactory but, when Tompkins probes further, Wayne will only say that his world of desire was in the recent past.
The story closes with Wayne paying Tompkins for the trip with “a pair of army boots, a knife, two coils of copper wire, and three small cans of corned beef” before he leaves the store:

[Wayne] hurried down to the end of the lane of gray rubble. Beyond it, as far as he could see, lay flat fields of rubble, brown and gray and black. Those fields, stretching to every horizon, were made of the twisted corpses of buildings, the shattered remnants of trees and the fine white ash that once was human flesh and bone.

We realise that Wayne’s comfortable, unexceptional middle-class life with his wife and son was the world he desired, and that he is actually the survivor of a nuclear war. The few remaining paragraphs of the story hint at what this entails, and ends with Wayne resolving to get back to his shelter before the rats come out and he misses his potato ration.
The story’s ending is a gut punch, even if you guess what is coming before you get to the reveal (I figured out where it was going just before Wayne handed over the payment2).
A very good—and well-constructed—story,3 and one that makes you reflect that there are much worse options than living in modern day Western society, for all its failings.
**** (Very Good). 2,400 words. Story link.

1. This story was first published under the title The World of Heart’s Desire.

2. There are several clues before the reveal: the rubble strewn street, the dilapidated building, the rusty hypodermic, and the year Wayne spends thinking about whether or not to take the trip (the experience is described as a year long in the setup).

3. I’d definitely put this in a Best of Robert Sheckley collection, along with Specialist and Pilgrimage to Earth.

Santa Clause by Robert F. Young

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Santa Clause by Robert F. Young (F&SF, January 1959)1 starts with Ross requesting his own personal Santa Claus from the devil (who he has just summoned). The devil agrees, but says he can’t subdivide “childhood fantasy”.
Ross subsequently gets the Xmas presents he wants, including a pretty blonde wife called Candy, but things starts going awry almost at once: she refuses to have anything to do with him after she has kissed him goodnight and shuts him out of her bedroom; then Jack Frost appears to ice the windows; the Sandman throws sand in his eyes before he sleeps; and a Guardian Angel—a guitar playing cowboy with wings—appears. Later on, Candy becomes pregnant (even though Ross still hasn’t been near her).
Eventually, after a few more months of these childhood fantasies (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc.), the Stork comes tapping at the window. Ross decides he has had enough, and once more summons the Devil: Ross tells him he wants out of the deal. The Devil agrees to modify their contract so that he won’t live in a world of childhood fantasy—but again specifies it will be for life, and apply retrospectively.
The final twist of the story (spoiler) has Ross loathing Candy, when he thinks of her, “almost as much as his mother”.
I guess the wife-mother psychosexual tangle made sense to 1950s Freudians, but it seems quite quaint today.
** (Average). 3,600 words.

1. I initially wondered if this story had first appeared in Playboy and, when I learned not, whether it was written with that magazine in mind.

What Now, Little Man? by Mark Clifton

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What Now, Little Man? by Mark Clifton (F&SF, December 1959) is set on the frontier planet of Libo, and opens with a conversation between Jim MacPherson, the narrator, and a friend called Paul Tyler about an indigenous lifeform called the Goonie (after Albatrosses on Earth, who similarly do not flee when predated by man). During this data dump, we learn that the goonies are kept to supply meat for the colony, domesticated to do simple tasks, and are physically beautiful:

[I] marveled, oh, for maybe the thousandth time, at the impossibility of communicating the goonie to anyone who hadn’t seen them. The ancient Greek sculptors didn’t mind combining human and animal form, and somebody once said the goonie began where those sculptors left off. No human muscle cultist ever managed quite the perfect symmetry natural to the goonie—grace without calculation, beauty without artifice. Their pelts varied in color from the silver blond of this pair to a coal black, and their huge eyes from the palest topaz to an emerald green, and from emerald green to deep-hued amethyst. The tightly curled mane spread down the nape and flared out over the shoulders like a cape to blend with the short, fine pelt covering the body. Their faces were like Greek sculpture, too, yet not human. No, not human. Not even humanoid, because—well, because, that was a comparison never made on Libo. That comparison was one thing we couldn’t tolerate. Definitely, then, neither human nor humanoid.  pp. 276-277 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

There is more data-dumping in the next section, where we learn that MacPherson started his career by planting a plantation of pal trees to attract the goonies and, while he names his domesticated “pet” animals—some of whom MacPherson has recently taught to read and write—the others are treated as livestock. We also get an angst-laden account about space travel making humans sterile and therefore unable to reproduce on Libo. This setup is further complicated with the arrival of a woman called Miriam Wellman from the Mass Psychology unit, who starts holding meetings where she induces therapeutic “frenzies” among the rapidly increasing male population.
The story eventually gets going when Tyler hires a goonie from MacPherson to do his reports for Hest, a recently arrived and troublesome official—who is later ridiculed by Tyler when he reveals that a goonie wrote them. Tyler also adds that that the alien is better at the job than Hest and, by saying this, he breaks a local taboo in comparing humans adversely to the goonies. He is subsequently cold-shouldered by the town folks.
After this exchange, MacPherson talks to Tyler in an effort to supress his revelation, but a businessman subsequently arrives at MacPherson’s farm wanting to buy one of the goonies who can read and write; MacPherson refuses, but the business man later tricks McPherson’s wife into giving him one for cash.
After MacPherson discovers what has happened he goes looking for his goonie, but ends up in Wellman’s cottage:

“My work here is about finished,” she said, as she came over to her chair and sat down again. “It will do no harm to tell you why. You’re not a Company man, and your reputation is one of discretion. . . . The point is, in mass hiring for jobs in such places as Libo, we make mistakes in Personnel. Our tests are not perfect.”
“We?” I asked.
“I’m a trouble-shooter for Company Personnel,” she said.
“All this mumbo-jumbo,” I said. “Getting out there and whipping these boys up into frenzies . . .”
“You know about medical inoculation, vaccination,” she said. “Under proper controls, it can be psychologically applied. A little virus, a little fever, and from there on, most people are immune. Some aren’t. With some, it goes into a full-stage disease. We don’t know which is which without test. We have to test. Those who can’t pass the test, Mr. MacPherson, are shipped back to Earth. This way we find out quickly, instead of letting some Typhoid Marys gradually infect a whole colony.”
“Hest,” I said.
“Hest is valuable,” she said. “He thinks he is transferred often because we need him to set up procedures and routines. Actually it’s because he is a natural focal point for the wrong ones to gather round. Birds of a feather. Sending him out a couple months in advance of a trouble-shooter saves us a lot of time. We already know where to look when we get there.”
“He doesn’t catch on?” I asked.
“People get blinded by their own self-importance,” she said. “He can’t see beyond himself. And,” she added, “we vary our techniques.  p. 299 ibid.

The story finally climaxes on Carson’s Hill, where a lynch mob intends to kill the goonie. MacPherson climbs the hill intending to save the creature but soon sees he is outnumbered. As he considers what to do, Wellman arrives and treats the group of men like errant children. The crowd begins to dissipate:

“Oh, no, you don’t, Peter Blackburn!” Miss Wellman snapped at him, as if he were four years old. “You come right back here and untie this poor goonie. Shame on you. You, too, Carl Hest. The very idea!”
One by one she called them by name, whipped them with phrases used on small children—but never on grown men.
She was a professional, she knew what she was doing. And she had been right in what she had told me—if I’d butted in, there might have been incalculable damage done.
Force would not have stopped them. It would have egged them on, increased the passion. They would have gloried in resisting it. It would have given meaning to a meaningless thing. The resistance would have been a part, a needed part, and given them the triumph of rape instead of the frustration of encountering motionless, indifferent acceptance.
But she had shocked them out of it, by not recognizing their grown maleness, their lustful dangerousness. She saw them as no more than naughty children—and they became that, in their own eyes.  pp. 305-306 ibid.

There is a philosophical postscript where MacPherson thinks about the goonies’ intelligence and, after reflecting on their behaviour when hunted, concludes “What is the point of survival if there is no purpose beyond survival.”
In conclusion, I found this an exceptionally clunky story full of unconvincing ideas and scenes (see the passage above) that don’t really fit together. Apart from the sketchy ecosystem (the goonies and the pal trees seem to be all there is on the planet), the idea that humans would treat an intelligent alien animal as a meat source is hard to get your head around nowadays, and I’m not entirely sure it would have that convincing in the late 1950s. Setting that aside, the seemingly endless amount of supposed psychology and cod philosophy stuffed into the story would, in any event, make for a dull piece. (I’d add that it seems like another thinly disguised Analog lecture dressed up as a story—imagine my surprise when I found it was first printed in F&SF! Is this a Campbell reject?)
After writing this review, it feels like this story should probably be rated as “mediocre,” but I see my notes say “average.” Only just, I suspect.
** (Average). 13,650 words. Story link.

The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon (F&SF, October 1959) opens with a boy annoying a man who is half-buried in sand with explanations about how his helicopter works:

He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.
The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.  p. 259 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

After this we learn that the man isn’t, for an unspecified reason, able to think straight, and his inchoate thoughts wander from a childhood concussion in a gym class to observations of his local environment—these include what he thinks is the sea in front of him—before moving on to an attempt to calculate the period of an overhead satellite. During these various thought processes (spoiler) it seems he may be somewhere other than Earth.
The next long section is a formative episode from the man’s youth, when he got into difficulties in the sea while snorkelling and almost drowned—all because he panicked but was reluctant to call for help. He then thinks about the kid with the helicopter, which makes him recall another model, one of a spacecraft that had several stages. Then he notices that the satellite is just about to disappear, and his final calculation of its period confirms where he is.
In the last section of the story he recalls the spacecraft again, but the real thing this time and not the model, and how the final two stages, Gamma and Delta, crashed onto the surface, ejecting a man to lie among radioactive graphite from the destroyed engine. Then the sun rises, and he realises that there isn’t a sea in front of him:

The sun is high now, high enough to show the sea is not a sea, but brown plain with the frost burned off it, as now it burns away from the hills, diffusing in air and blurring the edges of the sun’s disk, so that in a very few minutes there is no sun at all, but only a glare in the east. Then the valley below loses its shadows, and like an arrangement in a diorama, reveals the form and nature of the wreckage below: no tent-city this, no installation, but the true real ruin of Gamma and the eviscerated hulk of Delta. (Alpha was the muscle, Beta the brain; Gamma was a bird, but Delta, Delta was the way home.)  p. 269 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

He realises that this is his spaceship, and it crashed on Mars. He also realises that he is dying but, in his last moments, he rejoices that “we made it.”
This story may appear to have a slight narrative arc but a plot synopsis isn’t much use in an appreciation: what we really have here are a number of well-written and intensely evocative memories and scenes that are slowly brought into focus to reveal what has happened to the man. It’s an accomplished piece and, in terms of technique, atypical for the period.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,950 words. Story link.

Make a Prison by Lawrence Block

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Make a Prison by Lawrence Block (Science Fiction Stories, January 1959) gets off to a pretty good start with two Alteans discussing a prisoner—the murderer of three of their kind, the first such crime in thirty generations—who is about to be imprisoned in a tall tower. They talk about the security precautions (the curved, unclimbable walls, the pneumatic delivery tubes, etc.) and then watch as the shackled prisoner is sent up to the accommodation at the top.
Several minutes later the prisoner throws his shackles down (the key was at the top of the tower), and then (spoiler) he climbs the rail and flies away.
This latter event broke the story for me as there is no build up to this surprising event—it just happens. I presume the twist might work for those who were assuming that the prisoner is a human.
* (Mediocre). 1,000 words. Story link.

Plenitude by Will Mohler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Plenitude by Will Mohler (F&SF, November 1959, as by Will Worthington) starts with a four-year-old boy called Mike asking his narrator father various questions while they garden. As a result of these—why don’t they live in the “Old House in the Valley” anymore, are the “funny men” broken (explained by the narrator as a reference to derelict robots in the city), etc.—the story soon establishes itself as a post-collapse one.1
Then, when the narrator and son Mike return to their house for supper, he learns from his wife that his other son, a twelve-year-old called Chris, has gone hunting. It later becomes apparent that there has been a falling out between the two (and possibly an estrangement with a neighbouring family) as a result of a trip to the city where the narrator killed someone.
The rest of the story then flashbacks to a previous day of gardening, but this time with the elder son Chris, who is also questioning the father about why they live as they do and how society ended up in its present state. The narrator tries to answer these more involved and challenging questions but eventually becomes exasperated with his son and says he will take him into the city so he can see things for himself.
The climactic section (spoiler) sees the pair moving through a mostly derelict urban landscape until they come to a fence surrounding a group of large fluid-filled bubbles. Inside these people float seemingly unaware, connected up to various leads and hoses. The narrator cuts the perimeter fence and the pair go inside for a closer look:

I do not know the purpose of all the tubes and wires myself. I do know that some are connected with veins in their arms and legs, others are nutrient enemata and for collection of body wastes, still others are only mechanical tentacles which support and endlessly fondle and caress. I know that the wires leading to the metal caps on their heads are part of an invention more voracious and terrible than the ancient television—direct stimulation of certain areas of the brain, a constant running up and down the diapason of pleasurable sensation, controlled by a sort of electronic kaleidoscope.
My imagination stops about here. It would be the ultimate artificiality, with nothing of reality about it save endless variation. Of senselessness I will not think. I do not know if they see constantly shifting masses or motes of color, or smell exotic perfumes, or hear unending and constantly swelling music. I think not. I doubt that they even experience anything so immediate and yet so amorphous as the surge and recession of orgasm or the gratification of thirst being quenched. It would be stimulation without real stimulus; ultimate removal from reality. I decide not to speak of this to Chris. He has had enough. He has seen the wires and the tubes.  pp. 253-254 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

Then one of the occupants opens his eyes and sees the pair, and a guard robot quickly arrives. The narrator destroys it and then, in his rage, goes on to slash open the bubbles:

The corn-knife was not very sharp, but the skin of the sphere parted with disgusting ease. I heard Chris scream, “No! Dad! No!” . . . but I kept hacking. We were nearly engulfed in the pinkish, albuminous nutritive which gushed from the ruptured sac. I can still smell it.
The creatures inside were more terrible to see in the open air than they had been behind their protective layers of plastic material. They were dead white and they looked to be soft, although they must have had normal human skeletons. Their struggles were blind, pointless and feeble, like those of some kind of larvae found under dead wood, and the largest made a barely audible mewing sound as it groped about in search of what I cannot imagine.
I heard Chris retching violently, but could not tear my attention away from the spectacle. The sphere now looked like some huge coelenterate which had been halved for study in the laboratory, and the hoselike tentacles still moved like groping cilia.
The agony of the creatures in the “grape” (I cannot think of them as People) when they were first exposed to unfiltered, unprocessed air and sunlight, when the wires and tubes were torn from them, and especially when the metal caps on their heads fell off in their panicky struggles and the whole universe of chilly external reality rushed in upon them at once, is beyond my imagining; and perhaps this is merciful. This, and the fact that they lay in the stillness of death after only a very few minutes in the open air.
Memory is merciful too in its imperfection. All I remember of our homeward journey is the silence of it.  pp. 255-256 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

The remainder of the story returns to the present day, and sees a returned Mike and a neighouring family joining the narrator, wife and youngest son for supper. Mike appears reconciled, even unconcerned, about what happened.
This isn’t a perfect piece by any means (the conflict set up between the father and son fades away rather than being resolved in any meaningful or cathartic way) but it has some superior qualities. Not only is the story well written, with some good characterisation and vivid description, but the narrator’s reflective commentary also puts the reader right inside his head. This rich mixture transcends the slightness of the plot.
I’ll be tracking down more of Mohler’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.

1. This story reminded me a little, in places, of the novel Earth Abides by George Stewart.

Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller (F&SF, August 1959) begins with two (hairless) parents discussing, over their oatmeal, the dangers in commuting to the city to get food. Thereafter we get other hints that this is a post-holocaust or post-Collapse future when a discussion about a possible trip to the beach has mention of the boardwalk having been used for firewood and, when the couple’s three-year old comes in from outside, he is described as having down growing along his backbone (the woman wonders “if that was the way the three year olds had been before”). The child also bites a small chunk out of his mother’s shoulder when she chastises him for knocking over his oatmeal.
After this setup the couple decide—partly because they think it’s Saturday, partly because it’s a nice day—to go to the beach: they fill the car with only enough petrol to get there, and take a can’s worth for the return trip (which they plan to hide while they are on the beach). They also take weapons: a wrench for her, and a hammer for him.
On the drive there they see only a solitary cyclist and then, when they get to the beach, no-one at all. Later on, however, three men appear and threaten them, saying they want the couple’s gasoline. There is then an altercation during which the husband kills the leader with his hammer and the other two run off. Then the couple realise that the child has disappeared.
The remainder of the story sees the couple searching for the kid, and the husband eventually bringing him back. At this point the wife notes that they have time for one last swim (this with the attacker’s body still lying nearby). Then, on the way home:

He fell asleep in her lap on the way home, lying forward against her with his head at her neck the way she liked. The sunset was deep, with reds and purples.
She leaned against Ben. “The beach always makes you tired,” she said. “I remember that from before too. I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
They drove silently along the wide empty parkway. The car had no lights, but that didn’t matter.
“We did have a good day after all,” she said. “I feel renewed.”
“Good,” he said.
[. . .]
“We had a good day,” she said again. “And Littleboy saw the sea.” She put her hand on the sleeping boy’s hair, gently so as not to disturb him and then she yawned. “I wonder if it really was Saturday.”  p. 174 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This is an effectively dystopian piece, but its impact will probably be blunted for most readers by the many similar tales that have appeared since. I suspect, however, this story was notably grim for the time, and it foreshadows later new wave stories.
*** (Good). 4,100 words. Story link.

A Death in the House by Clifford D. Simak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Death in the House (Galaxy, October 1959) by Clifford D. Simak starts with a farmer called Old Mose looking for his cows but discovering an injured alien:

It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank.
It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn’t made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was too weak; it never moved an inch.
It was groaning, too, but not too loud—just the kind of keening sound a lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it than just the sound of winter wind; there was a frightened, desperate note that made the hair stand up on Old Mose’s nape.
Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a lot of foolhardiness.
But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn’t leave it there, so he walked up to it and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure out—as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a way that no one had ever smelled before.  p. 134-135 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

Eventually Mose manages to free the creature and takes it back to his farm (and his less than salubrious surroundings—we learn later that he is a widower, and has also lost his dog to old age). After putting the creature in front of the fire he phones the local doctor, who attends, but cannot do anything for the creature. Mose pays him with a silver dollar (this will be significant later) and meantime goes out into the woods to recover the alien’s damaged ship, a bird cage-like machine.
When Mose wakes up the next day the alien has died—and the story becomes an different piece entirely, one which begins with him attempting to get a plot in the town cemetery so he can give the creature a decent burial. He is unsuccessful, and then also fails to get the parson to come out to the farm to perform a service when he decides to bury the alien on his land. When Mose prepares the body for burial he finds a cloudy glass sphere in a pocket-sized slit in the alien’s body, which he subsequently replaces.
Various visitors turn up at the farm in the days that follow: the local sheriff, a professor from the nearby university, and a flying saucer nut—but Mose has already ploughed over the grave to hide it, and bluntly tells them he will not reveal the location.
The final leg of the story (spoiler) sees an odd plant start to grow on the site of the burial plot and eventually form a recognisable shape. One morning Mose wakes up to see the clone or descendant of the alien at his door. As Mose’s loneliness has been established throughout the tale, he is delighted to see the creature—but then it sees the bird cage machine in the barn and indicates to Mose that it wants it repaired. Mose is conflicted by this as he realises that he will not only lose the alien’s company but will also have to sacrifice all the silver dollars he has hidden away—his entire savings—to make an internal part to repair the machine.
After the ship is repaired, and just before the alien gets in its machine and vanishes, it gives Mose the small glass sphere that he previously found on the body—but this time it is clear and not cloudy. It makes Mose feel happier, and gives him a sense of companionship.
The final paragraph of the story then switches to the alien’s point of view and, as well as bootstrapping the quality of this piece up another notch, partly reframes what has come before:

It was dark and lonely and unending in the depths of space with no Companion. It might be long before another was obtainable.
It perhaps was a foolish thing to do, but the old creature had been such a kind savage, so fumbling and so pitiful and eager to help. And one who travels far and fast must likewise travel light. There had been nothing else to give.  p. 154 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This story, with its principled, compassionate and very human main character, is a lovely piece, and a surprisingly affecting one too. Certainly one for a ‘Best of Clifford Simak’ volume, and a no-brainer for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology as well.
**** (Very good). 8,050 words

The Dreamsman by Gordon R. Dickson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dreamsman by Gordon R. Dickson (Star Science Fiction #6, 1959) begins with a Mr Willer shaving, until:

[He] poises the razor for its first stroke—and instantly freezes in position. For a second he stands immobile. Then his false teeth clack once and he starts to pivot slowly toward the northwest, razor still in hand, quivering like a directional antenna seeking its exact target. This is as it should be. Mr. Willer, wrinkles, false teeth and all, is a directional antenna.  p. 78 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

Shortly afterwards, Willer goes to a house and confronts the couple who live there, stating that they are telepaths who are transmitting. After he manages to win their confidence (admitting in the process that he is almost two hundred years old) he tells the couple that he can take them to a colony of similarly talented people. They then drive to a military base and, after Willer has hypnotised his way past the soldiers and guards, reach a spaceship that will supposedly take the couple to Venus.
At this point (spoiler) a man dressed in silver mesh arrives and reveals that Willer routinely disposes of psi-capable people so Earth people won’t evolve and be admitted into Galactic Society (of which the silver-mesh man is a representative). The reason? Mr Willer likes things the way they are.
An unconvincing squib that is a collection of worn out clichés.
* (Mediocre). 2,850 words.

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson (Playboy, July 1959) opens with a Mr Melchior and his personnel manager, Mr Taylor, driving to lunch with a psychologist, Dr Colles. Melchior tells Colles about an otherwise normal man who murdered a rival just to secure a promotion, and goes on to ask Colles to produce a test that will weed out such individuals from his company.
Inserted into this strand of the narrative is a section about an employee of Melichor’s called Joe Clock, who has borrowed money from a workmate but, as we see, has no intention of paying it back. Joe later completes the psychological screening test that Colles develops:

There are lots worse crimes than murder. Probably . . . Sure. Lots worse. The average person will do anything for money. Absolutely right they would. Why not, if you can get away with it? Sure. And the same way, that’s why you got to watch out for yourself.
There are worse things than losing your home. What? Catching leprosy?
And then the way to answer the question changed. Now you had to pick out an answer. Like, Most people who hit someone with their car at night would (a) report to the police first (b) give first aid (c) make a getaway if possible. Well, any damn fool would know it was the last. In fact, anyone but a damn fool would do just that. That’s what he did that time. (c)
Now, a dope like Aberdeen: he’d probably stop his car. Stick his nose in someone else’s tough luck. Anybody stupid enough to lend his rent money—  p. 38-39 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

The story develops further (spoiler) when Colles notices, having completed the work some weeks before, problematic mentions of Melchior and his ex-employees in the newspapers. He then discovers that nearly all the company men shown by the test to have psychopathic tendencies are still employed.
Colles confronts Melchior with this information—and then asks to work for him (there are a couple of earlier hints in the story that Colles is fairly amoral). The story finishes with a biter-bit ending where the personnel manager Taylor (another one of the story’s many psychopaths) has Melchior and Colles shot by Joe Clock and another man.
This is well enough told, and interesting enough, but the idea is barely credible. And some will see where the plot is going, or be unsurprised when they get there.
** (Average). 6,350 words.