Search Worlds Without End

Table of Contents:

• The Maze - (1950) - short story
• The Reluctant Heroes - (1951) - novelette
• The Fire and the Sword - (1951) - novelette
• The Santa Claus Planet - (1951) - novelette
• The Hunting Season - (1951) - novella
• The Wreck of the Ship John B. - (1967) - novelette
• East Wind, West Wind - (1972) - novelette
• A Life in the Day of... - (1969) - short story
• Downhill All the Way - (1974) - short story

During the construction of a coast-to-coast subway system, disaster strikes, and Chief Engineer Nordlund and his group are trapped underground with a crazed killer on the loose.

There is one weapon left to the cornered and surrounded victim of an ambush -- a weapon that is unmatchable, however strong his opponent. Desperation itself, properly used, is a potent weapon ...

This short tory is included in the anthology "Combat SF" (1981), edited by Gordon R. Dickson.

It first appeared in the January, 1951 Issue of Astounding Science Fiction, available on Internet Archives.

For 2,000 years, the starship Astron has search the galaxy for alien life - without success. Now, just as the ship is falling apart, the only direction left to explore is across the Dark, a 100-generation journey through empty space.The ship's captain - immortal, obessed - refuses to abandon the quest. He will cross the Dark, or destroy the ship trying.

Only Sparrow, a young crewman uncertain of his own past, can stand against the captain, and against the lure and challenge of the dark beyond the stars....

It was the most dangerous test since the first A-bomb. Aboard the mammoth Trident submarine 'Alaska' on patrol and cut off from contact with the outside world, the crew was deliberately and systematically being led to believe that Russia had attacked the United States. Would the crew follow standing orders and fire their missiles in retaliation? Would they release the final weapon in a war that could not be won?

As the number of deaths from what appears to be a virulent strain of flu continues to mount, the possibility grows that the epidemic is the first stage in germ warfare.

A researcher named Tanner, discovers evidence of a person with psychic abilities among his coworkers. As he tries to uncover the superhuman, his existence is erased and his associates murdered, until he faces a showdown with an apparently undefeatable opponent.

In northern California, Project Prometheus, a five-billion-dollar nuclear power station--the largest in the world--has reached the final critical stages of thermal equilibrium. But deep within the reacotr's central core, the factor of human error sparks that one chance in 300,000,000... that no one can reverse.

There are people living among us, who look just like normal human beings. They've been here for a long time--waiting. But they aren't exactly like us at all. Some of them can read minds, and in subtle ways take over what your are thinking, control you for a while.

They can make you love.

They can make you die.

One ordinary man in San Francisco, Arthur Banks, begins to find them out, and immediately his life and his family are in danger. It's a paranoid's worst nightmare. But that's just where it starts. He may well be fighting for the survival of the entire human race.