Tag: Astounding

Impostor by Philip K. Dick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Impostor by Philip K. Dick (Astounding, June 1953) starts with the protagonist, Olham, having breakfast with his wife. During this they talk about a permanent war with the Outspacers, aliens from Alpha Centauri, and the recent development of the protec-bubbles that now surround the planet. What is also cleverly inserted into this opening section is the seemingly inconsequential mention of a fire at nearby Sutton Wood, a location that will reappear later in the story.
When Olham is later picked up to go to work by an older colleague called Nelson (they are both high ranking officials at a defence project), Olham sees there is another man in the car. The man identifies himself as Peters, says he works for security, and that he is there to arrest Olham for being an Outspace spy. The car quickly gets airborne and heads for the Moon while Peters calls his boss to tell him about the successful arrest.
The rest of the story is a fast-paced tale that sees Peters explain that an Outspace ship with a humanoid robot containing a U-bomb recently penetrated the protec-bubble surrounding Earth. Peters then states that Olham is the Outspace robot, and that they intend dismantling him on the far side of the Moon. Olham frantically tries to convince Peters and Nelson that the robot must have failed to reach him, and that he is the real Olham. However, when they land on the Moon, and Olham sees he still has not convinced them, he says he is about to explode. Nelson and Peters flee from the car (they have put their spacesuits on before landing), and Olham quickly closes the door and returns to Earth.
The final section of the story (spoiler) sees Olham return home, escape from an ambush, and eventually make his way to Sutton Wood. There he finds the remains of a burnt-out Outsider spaceship. Then, when Peters, Nelson and a security detail arrive shortly afterwards, Olham manages to convince Peters to go over and look at a body lying near the wreckage. Peters and the team look at the body and decide that it is the robot, but then Nelson pulls on what he thinks is the metal corner of the U-bomb in the robot’s body:

Nelson stood up. He was holding onto the metal object. His face was blank with terror. It was a metal knife, an Outspace needle-knife, covered with blood.
“This killed him,” Nelson whispered. “My friend was killed with this.” He looked at Olham. “You killed him with this and left him beside the ship.”
Olham was trembling. His teeth chattered. He looked from the knife to the body. “This can’t be Olham,” he said. His mind spun, everything was whirling. “Was I wrong?”
He gaped.
“But if that’s Olham, then I must be . . .”
He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

This suspenseful and paranoid piece has a dreamlike feel (apart from Olham’s nightmarish predicament there is the quick trip to the moon and back), and you never really know until the final moments if Olham is a robot or not.1 This, and the fast pace of the story, keeps the reader off-balance and lets the writer gloss over one or two things that might have revealed Olham’s true nature (the brief door opening on the Moon; the question of how the robot would get Olham’s memories).
An impressive piece that reflects the Reds-under-the bed fears of the time, and Philip K. Dick’s only sale to John W. Campbell (I note that the story is another exception to Campbell’s supposed Human Exceptionalism rule2).
**** (Very Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. Dick would return to this theme in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was later filmed as Bladerunner).

2. A writer remarked to me, “It’s a story where The Thing wins”.

The Gift of Gab by Jack Vance

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Gift of Gab by Jack Vance (Astounding, September 1955)1 is set on the oceans of an alien planet called Sabrina, and begins with Sam Fletcher, an employee of Pelagic Recoveries (a metals extraction company) looking for Carl Raight to take over his shift. After Fletcher unsuccessfully searches the large raft they use for processing (barnacles for tantalum, sea slugs for rhenium, and coral for rhodium) and gets no useful information from his co-workers, he takes the launch over to the nearby collecting barge. It is also deserted, and Fletcher comes to the conclusion that Raight must have fallen overboard. Then, as Fletcher fills up the holds before returning to the raft, he is attacked by the tentacle of an alien life form that coils around his leg and tries to pull him overboard. Fletcher only just manages to avoid this by cutting the tentacle with a nearby tool. Then, when Fletcher then looks over the side of the barge he sees another alien creature, a ten-armed, one-eyed dekabrach, swimming nearby. Fletcher takes the barge back to the raft and tells the rest of the crew what has happened.
Fletcher then gets together with a scientist called Damon and they go through their (non-computerised!) card index machine to try to identify the creature that attacked him. They find a lifeform called a monitor, which may have been the creature responsible, and also look at the dekabrach records. It is obvious that that parts have been deleted, and Fletcher learns from Damon that Chrystal—an ex-employee who has set up his own private company and is working nearby—did the initial capture and dissection of the dekabrachs. Fletcher video-phones Chrystal and warns him about what has happened, and asks him about deletions on the dekabrach records: Chrystal is hazy on the details.
These events set up much of what happens in the rest of the story, which begin with another man going missing, and Fetcher being attacked again, which leads him to take a submarine down into the deeps to explore (the first of two trips he will make); meanwhile Damon catches a dekabrach.
When Fletcher returns later he has a tale of the dekabrachs’ social organisation and coral houses; then he learns from Damon that the dekabrachs’ bodies may be worth processing for niobium. This information, along with the doctored records, point the finger of suspicion at Chrystal, so Fletcher goes to visit him. After an argument about the sentience of the dekabrachs, Fletcher sees a catch of the creatures landed in the middle of a hail of sea darts fired from the sea. There is some gunplay, and Fletcher arrests Chrystal.
The last part of the story sees Fletcher and Damon learn how to communicate with the captive Dekabrach so they can prove its intelligence to a planetary inspector who will arrive shortly. When the inspector lands on the planet and starts his investigation, there is a melodramatic episode where Chrystal breaks free and tries to poison the dekabrach with acid. Fletcher and Damon manage to save the creature, and it then identifies Chrystal as its attacker. Chrystal isn’t finished yet though, and pulls out his recovered gun, although his attempt to shoot the dekabrach is foiled by Fletcher, who takes the bullet.
The story closes with (the recovered) Fletcher and Damon deciding to stay on the planet rather than shipping out. They release the captive Dekabrach with a plea to bring others of its kind back for language training—and it does.
I rather liked this piece for a number of reasons: first, it is set in an exotic ocean environment, but one made realistic by the industrial process at work there; second, the story is an interesting and absorbing one (although you can see the obvious bad guy a mile off); finally, the piece slowly morphs from a whodunit into a first contact story as it progresses. That said, it has a few problems: I’ve already mentioned the bad guy (who is obviously dodgy, and spends more time than is convincing causing havoc); the two trips that Fletcher makes to the deeps are not experienced directly by the reader but are recounted by him later (this also involves a slightly disorientating point of view change—the only one in the story—while he is away on the first trip); the communication section and its code table makes for a dull read (I’d put serious money on that latter having been inserted by a meddling John W. Campbell); and there are probably other things as well, such as the dekabrachs readily forgiving the mass murder of their people, etc. Still, it is an enjoyable alien ecology story—a good yarn I suppose you could say—with an uplifting, slightly sense-of-wonderish ending that just puts it into the star category below.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 17,650 words. Story link.

1. This was part of a group read on one of my Facebook groups. One commenter said, “It’s one of the least characteristic Vance stories I know, and of all those probably the best. (What I mean is, the other uncharacteristic ones strike me as potboilers, but this is pretty good.)”. Others added, “A surprisingly science-fictiony story by Vance”, “Atypical Vance but still good”, “A great story that isn’t very Vancian”, etc.

Child’s Play by William Tenn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Child’s Play by William Tenn (Astounding, March 1947) opens in Mimsy Were the Borogoves territory when a struggling lawyer called Sam Weber accidentally gets a Christmas present from the future. When Weber finally manages to open the package (it eventually responds to his voice commands), he finds that it is a children’s “Bild-a-Man” kit:

Bild-a-Man Set 3. This set is intended solely for the use of children between the ages of eleven and thirteen. The equipment, much more advanced than Bild-a-Man Sets 1 and 2, will enable the child of this age group to build and assemble complete adult humans in perfect working order. The retarded child may also construct the babies and mannikins of the earlier kits. Two disassembleators are provided so that the set can be used again and again with profit. As with Sets 1 and 2, the aid of a census keeper in all disassembling is advised. Refills and additional parts may be acquired from The Bild-a-Man Company, 928 Diagonal Level, Glunt City, Ohio. Remember—only with a Bild-a-Man can you build a man.

After this the story switches to the law office where Weber works, where we find out that Weber has a crush on Tina, the office secretary, but so has the more successful Lew Knight. We also see Tina tell Weber that a strange-looking old man has been enquiring about him.
The rest of the story runs along the twin tracks of (a) Weber experimenting with the Bild-a-man set (he creates various malformed creatures which he eventually disassembles, and then a copy of a baby he is minding for the parents—which he eventually drops off at an orphanage); and (b) Weber watching as Tina goes out with Lew and eventually gets engaged. This latter event makes Weber decide to create a copy of Tina (who he convinces to scan herself in the office on the pretence of getting a wedding present for her), but he then makes a copy of himself first to make sure he has perfected the method.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees the duplicate Weber wake up and destroy the dissassembleator. There is then some back and forth between the pair just before the strange old man arrives at Weber’s flat (Weber’s landlady mentioned earlier that the strange old man has been looking for him). The man reveals that he is the census keeper for the twenty ninth oblong, and explains why he took so long to arrive at Weber’s flat even though he knew that Weber had accidentally been sent the Bild-a-Man kit from the future (procedures, etc.).
The old man then scans the two Webers and decides the most coherent personality (the Bild-a-Man kit is supposed to produce neurotic, unstable individuals) is the duplicate Weber and proceeds to disassemble the original.
This piece rather feels like a run-of-the-mill Henry Kuttner story with a standard ironic ending1—but, although it is competently executed, the office relationships rather date the piece, it tends to plod along, and it doesn’t have the sense of wonder of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves, or the darkness of Cyril Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag.2
*** (Good). 10,550 words. Story link.

1. Coincidentally, I later found this passage in Josh Lukin’s interview of Willian Tenn, A Jew’s-Eye View of the Universe, reprinted in Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn by William Tenn, 2004:

WT: And then I went to sea as a purser on a cargo ship. A purser is a staff officer, head of administrative matters on board a ship. And the reason I went to sea was that I was still living at home at the time, and I had to write on the train going to and from my job. So I found out that on a cargo ship, when the ship is at sea, the radio operator is very busy, and he has nothing to do when the ship is in port, so he takes off The purser, on the other hand, is very busy when the ship is in port, but has litde to do while the ship is at sea. So I figured I would make enough money to support my family and have time to write. And while at sea, I wrote “Child’s Play,” which was my second published story, and of which I was for a long time reasonably proud. I’m not ashamed of it now, but it’s a story by a juvenile: I’m not as proud of it as I was at one time. But it was a tremendous success.
JL: It’s been dramatized for radio at least twice…
WT: Oh yes, for radio, for television—it was anthologized about fifty times, at one point more than almost any other story, all over the world. Clifton Fadiman wrote a nice mention of it for The New Yorker.
JL: I see Kuttner’s influence…
WT: At a given point, I became aware that I was writing what I thought was a Lewis Padgett story. This story is, in a sense, a “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” I began feeling that I was writing a story that Padgett would have written, and since I loved Padgett, I now had the pleasure of finding out what was going to happen next! It was definitely a Kuttner story. I didn’t know then of Henry Kuttner: I knew Lewis Padgett. I didn’t know that Lewis Padgett was Kuttner or C.L. Moore or anything of those people.
That sold very well. All kinds of New York science-fiction magazine editors wanted stories by me. Ted Sturgeon became my agent. I had met him before the war, in a cafeteria in 1939 on 57th Street. He was the first professional writer I met. He had just been beached: he was a sailor at the time. He had sold two stories to Campbell: one to Unknown, “A God in a Garden,” and one to Astounding, “Ether Breather.” I got to know him, and he was the only professional writer I knew for a long time. I looked him up after I came out of the Army and he came back from the tropics. I’d read his work in the meantime. And when I wrote “Child’s Play,” he told me that he was then functioning as an agent for Damon Knight, Jim Blish, Judy Merril, Chandler Davis, and a whole bunch of other people. He was a very good agent. So he became my agent and helped me get published in all sorts of magazines: Campbell’s Astounding, of course, as well as those of lesser stature.  pp. 258-259

2. According to Robert Silverberg’s introduction to The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, this story was supposed to be included in that volume but the rights could not be obtained. I think it would have been shown up by the Kuttner & Moore and Kornbluth stories mentioned above and, apart from that, it would have been the third story in the book using the same basic gimmick.

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz (Astounding, February 1955) opens with a fifteen-year-old called Cord anesthetising and examining bugs on an alien planet called Sutang. He is then interrupted by Grayan, an older female friend who warns him that, if he doesn’t start behaving in accordance with the colony’s rules and expectations, he is likely to be sent off-planet.
After this YA setup to the story, the next part sees Cord, Grayan, Nirmond (the regent of the planet), and a young woman called Dane (head of the visiting Colonial Team) set off on a tour of the Bay Farms. To travel there they use one of the planetary life-forms:

Three rafts lay moored just offshore in the marshy cove, at the edge of which Nirmond had stopped the treadcar. They looked somewhat like exceptionally broad-brimmed, well-worn sugarloaf hats floating out there, green and leathery. Or like lily pads twenty-five feet across, with the upper section of a big, gray green pineapple growing from the center of each. Plant animals of some sort. Sutang was too new to have had its phyla sorted out into anything remotely like an orderly classification. The rafts were a local oddity which had been investigated and could be regarded as harmless and moderately useful. Their usefulness lay in the fact that they were employed as a rather slow means of transportation about the shallow, swampy waters of the Yoger Bay. That was as far as the team’s interest in them went at present.

They then go looking for “Grandpa”, a bigger raft they’d rather use but, when they eventually find it, Cord sees that it has moved from where he last left it. They also find that Grandpa’s head (a cone shaped protuberance in the middle of the raft) now has red buds on the top, and has also sprouted vines. Cord attempts to warn the others about using the raft as they have never seen this phenomenon before, but he is fobbed off.
The rest of the story sees an uneventful passage until they pass a group of yellowheads (“vaguely froggy things, man-sized and better”) clinging to tall reeds when, uncharacteristically, one of them slips down into the water and swims underneath Grandpa. Shortly after this event they lose control of the raft (it won’t respond to the heat from their guns) and then there is a convulsion that sees all of them except Cord trapped by the vines. Cord is subsequently forced, after a brief conversation with Dane, to relieve their pain by using his gun’s anaesthetic darts.
The rest of the story sees Grandpa travel far out to sea while Cord observes the creature’s behaviour. Eventually (spoiler) Cord manages to distract Grandpa (it has been swiping at various forms of life that pass before feeding on the smaller ones), and he jumps into the sea ahead. Cord then swims underneath the creature and manages to access a hollow space inside the central cone: there he finds the yellowhead symbiotically attached to Grandpa.
After fighting and killing the yellowhead, Cord slips back into the water and emerges to the rear of a now stationary raft. When he gets on board again it responds to his heat gun and the raft heads towards the shore.
For most of its length this reads like a rather dull YA biology puzzle, but it improves with an exciting climax. I’d note, however, that there is little indication of what Cord is about to do before he goes into the water (I can’t remember any description of him thinking about the yellowhead, or what he plans to do). This is rather too straightforward a piece, I think (especially for its length).
** (Average). 9,050 words. Story link.

Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke (Astounding, May 1946) opens with an alien spaceship commander telling the crew of the S9000 that they are about to arrive at the third planet of the solar system ahead—and that they only have four hours to explore before its sun goes nova! We then find out why the aliens have so little time:

“You will wonder how such a disaster, the greatest of which we have any record, has been allowed to occur. On one point I can reassure you. The fault does not lie with the survey.
“As you know, with our present fleet of under twelve thousand ships, it is possible to re-examine each of the eight thousand million solar systems in the galaxy at intervals of about a million years. Most worlds change very little in so short a time as that.
“Less than four hundred thousand years ago, the survey ship S5060 examined the planets of the system we are approaching. It found intelligence on none of them, though the third planet was teeming with animal life and two other worlds had once been inhabited. The usual report was submitted and the system is due for its next examination in six hundred thousand years.
“It now appears that in the incredibly short period since the last survey, intelligent life has appeared in the system [and a] civilization that can generate electromagnetic waves and all that that implies [has existed for two hundred years].”

“As you know, Bob, [insert explanium or handwavium here].”
When the S9000 arrives in Earth’s atmosphere two hours later they find they are too late: there are no signs of life, and the wildfires that have raged across the planet are dying out (they have run out of fuel).
Two scout ships are dispatched to explore the planet anyway. The first finds a set of mirrors that appear to be transmitting TV signals out into the galaxy; then they find a deserted city, apparently abandoned by humans years earlier when they returned to the live in the countryside. On return to the S9000, the crew find that the other scout ship has not returned.
The second ship, meantime, has found a huge administrative centre (jam packed with filing cabinets full of computer punch cards!) Then, when they leave to return to the S9000, they spot a huge tunnel opening and quickly decide to explore it—only to find themselves trapped by closing subway doors, and whisked off in a train that eventually takes them under the ocean.
The third act of the story sees the S9000 follow the train and rescue the scout ship crew at the next station. As they get them back on board, the sun goes nova (the ship is hiding in the lee of the Earth and the aliens see the Moon light up). The S9000 accelerates towards light speed as they leave the system.
There is final section to the story which sees the aliens realise that the mirrors are sending video signals of the catastrophe in a particular direction. When the S9000 follows they eventually see a “great fleet” of human generation ships ahead.
The last paragraphs see one of the aliens say they feel rather afraid of the humans’ fleet, and another reply that they are a “very determined people”, and that they had better be polite to them as “we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one”.
I liked this well enough, but it’s basically an overlong story (the two scout ship accounts have needless overlap and duplication) about aliens wandering about on a depopulated Earth and getting themselves into trouble. The strongest parts are probably the astronomical setup (the nova, the ship hiding in the Earth’s shadow), the dying Earth descriptions, and the slingshot ending where they find the generation ships (although not the last line, “Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny”, which seemed a rather dissonant and threatening expression of human exceptionalism).
*** (Good). 10,300 words. Story link.

Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman (Astounding, September 1938) is, unlike his notable Pithecanthropus Rejectus in the January issue, standard pulp fare that begins with the hero of the story, Captain Drury Banion, slugging a guy in a club when they make a pass at one of the singing-girls. When Banion subsequently finds out the man is the Martian traffic boss of Spaceways, Inc., he loses his job as a spaceship pilot. However, it isn’t long before a shady Martian character called Guxl approaches him to do an (illegal) flight and, after initially rebuffing the offer, Banion ends up taking it when the girl from the club slugs a cop outside the door to his room.
Banion soon finds himself flying Guxl and two shady Earthmen to an asteroid where there is “proto”, an illicit substance that is the lost—and, according to legend, guarded—treasure of a long-dead pirate called Corsair Mell. During the journey the singing-girl, Cassa Fabia, turns up as a stowaway, and is put to work as the ship’s domestic—and it isn’t long before Banion is boxing the ears of one of the Earthmen for making a pass at her (that woman is nothing but trouble, as they would say in the less enlightened thirties).
When the ship arrives at Asteroid 1204, Guxl and the two Earthmen set off to retrieve the proto—first wrecking the fuel lines to make sure Banion can’t leave without them, and to give him something to do while they are gone. Tarsus, one of the Earthmen, returns on his own and tries to make a deal with Banion, but they are interrupted when the other two arrive followed by a large black shape that attacks the ship. It stops its assault when night falls.
At sunrise the next day the (obviously solar-powered) guard starts attacking the ship once more, and Guxl and the two Earthmen (spoiler) go out to destroy it. They are unsuccessful however, and Hommoday, the other Earthman, gets ripped to pieces when he can’t get back into the ship fast enough. Guxl and Tarsus later die when the attacker punches through the hull, but Banion and Fabia get to an airtight part of the ship. Fabia improvises a spacesuit and, when it gets dark again, goes and retrieves Tarsus’s body so Banion has a spacesuit to finish his repairs (the improvised one wouldn’t have fitted him). However, the guard returns to attack the ship again before Banion is finished—so Fabia goes out and sprays it with the same fast setting enamel that she used to make her suit airtight: the guard grinds to a halt. Fabia later explains to Banion that it was obviously solar powered and, by the way, she is a Terrestrial League Policeman who organised his sacking and stowed away to recover the proto.
This is a formulaic pulp tale, and all a bit unlikely, but it’s fast paced, the solar-powered guard (and way it is incapacitated) is a neat enough idea, and it is notable and atypical for the period that Fabia (the “girl”) is ultimately the story’s brains and hero.
** (Average). 6,100 words. Story link.

Christmas Tree by John Christopher

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Tree by John Christopher (Astounding, February 1949) opens with an astronaut called Davies arriving on Earth. After his medical (we learn that space crew get one after every flight), he goes to buy a Christmas tree to take back to the Moon. We subsequently learn that a man called Hans has been exiled there for forty years because of a final health warning, which meant it would be suicide to undertake another trip back to Earth (the story’s gimmick is that no-one can predict how long it will be between an astronaut’s first and final warning—there can be several years between them—and many astronauts take the chance of continuing for a period after the first).
At the nursery, the owner shows Davies around:

“Major Davies, I’m delighted to see you. We don’t see many spacemen. Come and see my roses.”
He seemed eager and I let him take me. I wasn’t breaking my neck to get back into town.
He had a glasshouse full of roses. I hesitated in the doorway. Mr. Cliff said: “Well?”
“I’d forgotten they smelled like that,” I told him.
He said proudly, “It’s quite a showing. A week before Christmas and a showing like that. Look at this Frau Karl Druschki.”
It was a white rose, very nicely shaped and scented like spring. The roses had me. I crawled around after Mr. Cliff, seeing roses, feeling roses, breathing roses. I looked at my watch when it began to get dark.

After Davies explains Hans’ situation to the owner (during which he reveals he has had his own first health warning) he gets the tree for free.
When Davies eventually gets back to the Moon (spoiler), he and Louie (the part-time quartermaster who helped him smuggle the tree onboard) go to find Hans, but they find that he has passed away. The pair, along with another man, take Hans out onto the surface to bury him:

Portugese halted the caterpillar on the crest of a rise about midway between Luna City and Kelly’s Crater. It was the usual burial ground; the planet’s surface here was crosshatched in deep grooves by some age-old catastrophe. We clamped down the visors on our suits and got out. Portugese and I carried old Hans easily between us, his frail body fantastically light against lunar gravity. We put him down carefully in a wide, deep cleft, and I turned around toward the truck. Louie walked toward us, carrying the Christmas tree.
There had been moisture on it, which had frozen instantly into sparkling frost. It looked like a centerpiece out of a store window. It had seemed a good idea back in Luna City, but now it didn’t seem appropriate.
We wedged it in with rocks, Portugese read a prayer, and we walked back to the caterpillar, glad to be able to let our visors down again and light up cigarettes. We stayed there while we smoked, looking through the front screen. The tree stood up green and white against the sullen, hunching blackness of Kelly’s Crater. Right overhead was the Earth, glowing with daylight. I could make out Italy, clear and unsmudged, but farther north Hans’s beloved Austria was hidden under blotching December cloud.

The story finishes with Davies going to his delayed medical, where he gets his final warning—he is stuck on the Moon. Later, Davies goes to the observatory, where he looks at Earth and thinks he can smell roses.
The science in this story is a bit dated or just plain wrong in some parts (information about the Moon’s rotation, atmosphere, and body-eating insect life, etc.) but, if you can filter that out, it’s a pretty good piece, and an accomplished debut.
*** (Good). 3,200 words. Story link.

What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett (Astounding, February 1960) begins with the protagonist, Spencer Candron, arriving at The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., a front for a group of psi (mind-power) capable individuals. Once we eventually get beyond the over-padded beginning (which includes a description of the building, of Candron, and of the secretary and her role in keeping away the crazies) he finally receives a leisurely briefing about the Red Chinese abduction of a famous US physicist called Ch’ien at an international conference in their country (his abductors have attempted to cover this up by murdering a double). Candron is told to rescue Ch’ien before the Chinese uncover his interstellar drive secrets.
The story picks up pace when Candron flies over Chinese territory and arranges to have an aircraft door to fall off during the flight. He then jumps out:

Without a parachute, he had flung himself from the plane toward the earth below, and his only thought was his loathing, his repugnance, for that too, too solid ground beneath.
He didn’t hate it. That would be deadly, for hate implies as much attraction as love—the attraction of destruction. Fear, too, was out of the question; there must be no such relationship as that between the threatened and the threatener. Only loathing could save him. The earth beneath was utterly repulsive to him.
And he slowed.
His mind would not accept contact with the ground, and his body was forced to follow suit. He slowed.
Minutes later, he was drifting fifty feet above the surface, his altitude held steady by the emotional force of his mind. Not until then did he release the big suitcase he had been holding. He heard it thump as it hit, breaking open and scattering clothing around it.
In the distance, he could hear the faint moan of a siren. The Chinese radar had picked up two falling objects. And they would find two: one door and one suitcase, both of which could be accounted for by the “accident.” They would know that no parachute had opened; hence, if they found no body, they would be certain that no human being could have dropped from the plane.  p. 183 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

Not bad, and the next part of the story—where he establishes himself in a hotel room in the city—is interesting too. However, the piece falters when Candron later goes to the Security HQ in the middle of the city and makes full use of his psi powers: he holds onto the underside of a car with his fingertips as it goes through the checkpoint; levitates up an elevator shaft; impersonates a Chinese general in a phone call to the cell guards to organise his visit; and then goes down to see Ch’ien. This is all too easily done, as is his rescue of the physicist, which (spoiler) sees him knock the scientist unconscious with an uppercut, set off a smoke bomb, and then teleport them both back to his room in the city. There, he carries Ch’ien to the roof of the hotel, and levitates himself and the physicist out to sea where they eventually meet a submarine (this latter event happens when he’s getting a bit tired, something we find out after a two page lecture about the limits of the human mind and psionic abilities).
The last couple of pages of the story have a Senator and a couple of other men debrief Candron at the institute, and one of the questions they ask him is why he kept knocking the physicist unconscious throughout the flight to the sub. Candron replies with some typical Campbellian blather about psionics:

“It would ruin him,” Candron broke in, before the senator could speak. “If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to explain what he saw. What else could a scientist do?”
Senator Kerotski nodded, and his nod said, “I see. He would have diverted his attention from the field of the interstellar drive to the field of psionics. And he would have wasted years trying to explain an inherently nonlogical area of knowledge by logical means.”
“That’s right,” Candron said. “We would have set him off on a wild goose chase, trying to solve the problems of psionics by the scientific, the logical method. We would have presented him with an unsolvable problem.”
Taggert patted his knees. “We would have given him a problem that he could not solve with the methodology at hand. It would be as though we had proved to an ancient Greek philosopher that the cube could be doubled, and then allowed him to waste his life trying to do it with a straightedge and compass.”
“We know Ch’ien’s psychological pattern,” Candron continued. “He’s not capable of admitting that there is any other thought pattern than the logical. He would try to solve the problems of psionics by logical methods, and would waste the rest of his life trying to do the impossible.”  pp. 202-203 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

I think this sort of thing is what was meant by “pushing Campbell’s buttons” (i.e. pandering to the editor of Astounding magazine, John W. Campbell, and his sometimes whacky ideas).
I eventually lost patience with this story as I’m not a fan of work that (a) uses lazy SF ideas and terminology (“psi”) or (b) is obviously padded with word-rate generating material (e.g. endless description and lectures). But most of all I don’t like (c) stories (and movies—I’m looking at you Wonder Woman) where the superhero protagonists can seemingly do anything they want and are never in any sort of jeopardy.
If none of this applies to you, this may be an entertaining enough piece as it’s readable enough.
* (Mediocre). 10,900 words. Story link.