Search Worlds Without End

THE BARRIER

Jeff Adams stared northward. From this spot he could see over the hummocks and just make out the scarlet glow along the top of the Barrier, though he couldn't see the land along the base. This side, for two hundred miles to the east and to the west, was fallows country: loose, parched soil, except when the infrequent rains barely moistened it and caked the top, too sandy to support any Terran plant life. Only a few hundred yards north of the Barrier the green fields began. You could lean against the Barrier and stare through; the invisible impenetrable force-field wouldn't hurt you, even if you hurled yourself against it. A Bumsider could dream of being Inside and wonder what crime or deficiency had got his ancestors exiled to Bumside--but not for long; in Bumside you had to keep moving to keep eating...

Who--or what--is "OMHA"?

For over a thousand years the alien Gaddyl have ruled Earth, reducing men like Murno to bare existence and a Stone Age technology. Now the Gaddyl have changed their tactics, and men are to be hunted and slain like animals.

The only hope for man is in the mysterious slogan, "Omha Abides!" If Omha, the long-promised savior, exists, then Murno must find and awaken him... or it. Pursued by the Gaddyl and their savage mutant hunters, Murno must make his perilous cross-continent journey on foot in search of a legend.

And if he fails, mankind dies...

POISON PLANET

Earth colonized Durrent, a strange world of high mesas and poison valleys, where men could live only on the highest peaks. There were other stares to colonize, and better worlds--but space was vast. There was no way off Durrent until the chance visit of another wandering starship. The men of Earth were there to stay.

Even though much of the planet was forbidden, locked behind the barriers of poison gas, the colonies grew and became separate city-states. Then war broke out, and one young Fleet officer of Mesa Lowry, armed only with an outmoded training ship and a crew of half-trained civilians, found that the future of his world rested on the outcome of his battle to clear his family name of dishonor!

Mercenaries of the Galaxies.

All life on Earth had been destroyed in a quick and easy kill by the great and ruthless intergalactic Vulmot Empire. Only an elite group of spacemen survived the holocaust. The last earthlings, they were scattered wanderers through the galaxies, hiring out their fighting skills to whatever power needed them, yearly growing more bitter, dissolute, desparing.

By now the pitiful remnants of the Space Corps lacked even the will to fight - until a tantalizing promise from an enslaved race made them assemble one last time, for a mission only men with nothing to lose would attempt, for a final battle only desperate courage could win...

His name was Gondal, most feared of all creatures in the universe. But there was one ravenous ambition he had yet to satisfy. On a distant, sunless planet lay the key to the secret of the humanoids who had strangely vanished after reigning over all space. Gondal intended to discover that secret - and become master of the galaxies.

But Gondal needed one man to help him - an Earthling named Vince Cullow. Prisoner on Gondal's spaceship, Cullow was forced to choose between robot-like submission, and the kind of torture only the twisted mind of Gondal could conceive, as they sped toward the unknown...

WHEN MAN FIRST REACHED OUT TO THE STARS, THE THURGS ARRIVED BEARING GIFTS.

One was the Beam, a mysterious expressway to another part of the universe. The other was the ability to remove the brain from a dying person and install it in a substitute body - a 'subb'.

At first the gifts were accepted with unquestioning gratitude. Then a few people began to wonder. By making it so easy to get to one part of the universe, were the Thurgs, in effect, keeping the rest of the universe hidden? And the subbs. did they remain human? Were the Thurgs deliberately stocking the universe with a new brand of being - one capable of erasing mankind?

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, December 1965. The story is included in the collection Somewhere in Space and Other Stories: The Best of C. C. MacApp Volume 1 (2014).

Zeke Bolivar slipped out of null space to find a planet which defied, just by existing, all natural laws. For it wasn't a sphere, but only half of one. It floated in space, circling in a calm, regular orbit around its sun, like a vast half-grapefruit, cut neatly down the middle. Rimming the grotesque half-palnet along the "cut" was an opaque black wall. When he landed near the edge of the hemispheroid planet, he found he was expected. As events became more and more bizarre, he considered that he might simply be mad. Then an oddly familiar old man shoved Zeke at the black wall - which turned insubstantial and let him fall through...