Contact
Reviewed date: 2025 Aug 31
176 pages
I think I'd read the Leinster story before, but it's a good one. Chemical Plant is good, as were The Fire Balloons, The Gentle Vultures, and Knock. My favorite story was Specialist.
Introduction
Noel Keyes
First Contact
by Murray Leinster
A spaceship from Earth makes accidental first contact with an alien spaceship near the Crab Nebula. Both sides are cautious: revealing the location of their home world could lead to disaster if the other race is hostile. The only truly safe thing to do is to destroy the other vessel. But, not being hostile and hoping for the best, each side looks for a way out. Eventually they find it: each side strips their ship clean of any information, navigation aid, etc. that might point the way home. Then the crews don spacesuits, switch spacesuits, and head home in an alien spaceship.
Intelligence Test
by Harry Walton
First contact with an alien race comes at a truck stop diner where an alien cube has turned the diner into a trap: people can enter but not exit. It's worse than that: the borders are closing in. Those trapped inside must figure a way out--which is the point, after all. The alien is testing human intelligence.
The Large Ant
by Howard Fast
Mr. Morgan sees something out of the corner of his eye and instinctively he lashed out and smashed it. It's an ant. A large ant. An ant over a foot long. He takes it to a museum, where the curator and a United States Senator reveal the truth: this large ant is an alien species, and it's not the first that's been found. All have been killed; it seems humans are predisposed to instinctively destroy any large bug. What the point of this story is, I cannot possibly say.
What's He Doing in There?
by Fritz Leiber
A Martian visits the Professor, and asks to use the bathroom. He locks himself in and stays there all night while the Professor and family wonder what he's doing. He's sleeping in the bathtub. Martians love to sleep in water and the visitor just assumed, from watching Earth television, that bathtubs were for sleeping in.
Chemical Plant
by Ian Williamson
The disabled cruiser Persephone sets down on an alien planet next to a conspicuous landmark (a red lake), beams away a distress message, rolls into the lake and disappears. When the would-be rescuers come, they find the red lake but can't find Persephone. Commander Japp of the Interplanetary ship Berenice wants to wait for the whole fleet to show up, but it's Captain Britthouse of the Planetary ship Hannibal who analyzes the situation, correlates the facts, and locates Persephone. The strange vegetation that grows everywhere across the entire planet is part of a single living organism. The bright red lake is part of the creature's chemical life process: it's been "mining" the chromium that it needs from an exposed vein of ore, and processing it (via the brightly colored lakes) into the form it needs for its chlorophyll analog. Persephone's hull is made of chrome steel, so naturally the plant tipped the ship over into the lake to harvest the chromium. Britthouse empties the lakes, finds the now-paper-thin hull of Persephone on the lakebed, and rescues the men trapped inside.
Limiting Factor
by Clifford D. Simak
Griffith and Lawrence find two planets: one, strip-mined of everything useful. The second, a globe-spanning edifice of machinery. Both are abandoned. The machine planet is apparently some sort of giant calculating device, abandoned when its creators realized that its limitations --despite it being literally the size of an entire planet--meant it could never answer the questions they asked of it.
The Fire Balloons
by Ray Bradbury
The Very Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregine leads a group of Episcopal Fathers to Mars to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ. The others wish to preach to the sinful men and wanton women of First Town; Father Peregrine wishes to bring the gospel to the Martians. With help from the other Fathers, he makes contact with the old Martians, who look like floating blue globes of fire. He constructs an outdoor "church" in the hills where the Martians dwell and begins to preach to the Martians.
The Martians do finally make contact: they explain that they were once like Earth men, with bodies, living material lives. But long ago someone came to them, explaining a way to free their souls; they gave up their bodies, their need for material things, and now live in a sinless state of happiness.
I love that Bradbury isn't afraid to write about religion, about Christianity in particular, and to write in a way that acknowledges the sincerity, gentleness, and overall goodness of those who truly follow in the ways of Jesus. I'm not sure about the Martians--this giving up of one's bodies to live in a sinless state of pure energy sounds a little bit like early Christian heresies that viewed the body as sinful and the spirit as good. That's certainly not Christianity and I would have expected Father Peregrine to recognize and reject that heresy immediately. Then again, I think the big idea here is that God works differently on different planets. That was Mars's Truth, which is as true on Mars as Earth's truth (aka Christianity) is on Earth. I think. Anyway I like good religion stories.
Invasion from Mars
by Howard Koch
The screenplay for the Orson Welles radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds.
The Gentle Vultures
by Isaac Asimov
The peaceful Hurrians secretly observe Earth, waiting for the inevitable nuclear war to break out, after which they will help pick up the pieces, carefully guiding humanity into a more docile species who can join galactic civilization. But the war never comes, so the Hurrians abduct a man and question him about why this might be. The kidnapped man is horrified that the Hurrians would refuse to help prevent a nuclear war and that they will only help humans afterwards. He calls them vultures. The imagery is so disconcerting to the gentle Hurrians that they pack up and leave.
Knock
by Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown builds a great story around this sentence: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door . . ." The man is Walter Phelan, a professor. He is indeed the last man: the Zans wiped out all life on Earth except for a few hundred specimens (matched pairs, male and female, of course) for their zoo. The Zans are gravely concerned when some of their zoo animals start dying. The Zan are immortal and die only in accidents. Walter explains that Earth creatures are mortal and die after only a few years, and furthermore, require special care and handling. Soon the Zan start dying: so in terror they abandon Earth and their specimens, fleeing the planet that brings death. (It turns out Walter tricked them into giving special care hands-on care to a rattlesnake, which of course bit them and the venom caused death.) Oh, and the knock on the door? It's the last woman on Earth, coming to see the last Walter.
Specialist
by Robert Sheckley
The crew of a spaceship are rocked by a photon storm. They survive, but their Pusher is dead. They need a new Pusher. (The species is so fragile.) The crew is a collection of various species that work together to operate the FTL spaceship—who work together to be the FTL spaceship, and the Pusher is the one whose mind pushes them into FTL speeds.
They search nearby planets and eventually find a Pusher planet. It's Earth. They set down in a remote location and grab a Pusher (that is, a man.) They are surprised to find he has no idea about Pushing. These wild Pushers have grown up alone in the galaxy, and have had to generalize and fill all roles: they never had the chance to specialize and become what all Pushers are designed for. It's a tragedy.
Fortunately the man they pick up is game to try his hand at Pushing, and after a few tries he gets the hang of it. He Pushes. The ship jumps into FTL. It's a happy ending.
Lost Memory
by Howard Browne (as by Peter Phillips)
A lost spaceship lands on a planet of robots who have forgotten their makers. The robots, not understanding about biological life, presume the spaceship is a damaged robot, so they treat it accordingly. The man trapped inside frantically tries to explain that he is a Maker, that he is a human, that they should not open the skin of the spaceship and expose it to a vacuum that will kill him. But he's too late. The robots never do realize that the bit of strange protoplasm they find inside the spaceship was a living human being; they are more focused on the computer circuits of the strange lost robot whose life they were unable to save.