In response to a blog post in which I mildly praised "The Faithful Friend," a story by Evelyn E. Smith, a woman who has over fifty short story credits at isfdb, one of my knowledgeable readers recommended Smith's "Tea Tray in the Sky."  "Tea Tray in the Sky" debuted in the September 1952 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy, an issue which also includes a discourse on heroism in fiction and in real life from Gold, reviews by Groff Conklin of collections of old stories by David H. Keller, A. E. van Vogt and John W. Campbell, Jr, and brandy new stories by Katherine MacLean, Gordon R. Dickson and James H. Schmitz.  Let's get a peek at what kind of product Gold was selling back in the fall of 1952, nineteen years before I was born, by reading MacLean's, Dickson's and Schmitz's stories as well as Smith's.

"The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean

Looks like I've read three stories by MacLean over the years.  We've got "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" published in Ben Bova's Analog, and "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "Feedback," both from Campbell's Astounding.  I liked two of those three stories; let's hope "The Snowball Effect" makes that score 3 to 1.

The narrator of "The Snowball Effect" has recently been made dean and president of a university and charged with making the university profitable.  He goes to the head of the Sociology Department and asks this joker to explain how the Sociology Department can bring in money.  The professor claims he has come up with mathematical formulas that can describe and predict how organizations grow or shrink in size and power.  He tells the narrator that, if given six months, he can prove the value of sociology, and the prof and the prez develop a plan to experiment on some local people, try to make their little organization grow.

Using math equations, the sociology prof develops a scientifically designed constitution and organization chart for a local women's sewing club and gives it to the most ambitious and competent member of the club.  The twist of the story is that, four months later, when the prez checks in on the sewing club, he finds the competent woman has revolutionized the sewing club, turning it into a sort of social welfare NGO and using the super-scientific constitution and organization chart to grow the club into an entity of thousands.  The objective of this organization is to revolutionize the town, fashion it into "the jewel of the United States" with "a bright and glorious future—potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill—potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful—the best people in the best planned town in the country...."  By the sixth month mark the organization is huge, and has incorporated into itself businesses and politicians.  The protagonists predict in a decade or so the organization will take over America and then the world.  They expect that the organization will then, as all big institutions do, collapse, perhaps throwing the entire world into chaos, as when the Roman Empire collapsed.

This is an idea story that maybe is supposed to be funny, rather than a human story with suspense or human relationships, and everything about the idea is questionable, but "The Snowball Effect" isn't too long and it isn't poorly written or constructed, and I guess the idea is sort of interesting, so we're giving it a rating of acceptable.

I may think the story is just OK, but lots of editors are into it, maybe because it is very much about science, like a traditional science fiction story should be, but instead of romanticizing a hard science or engineering, disciplines anybody can see are awesome without having to be told they are awesome, in "The Snowball Effect" MacLean ups the level of difficulty she faces by tackling the task of trying to portray as effective one of those soft sciences we all instinctively know is a scam.  You can find "The Snowball Effect" in H. L. Gold's Second Galaxy Reader, Brian Aldiss' Penguin Science Fiction, Damon Knight's Science Fiction Inventions, multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name printed on their covers, Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell's Ascent of Wonder, the Vandermeers' Big Book of Science Fiction, and still other publications.  I daresay "The Snowball Effect" is a wish fulfillment fantasy for leftists, who dream of technocratic elites using mathematical formulas to control the masses and reshape society to their own specifications, but, to her credit, MacLean in her story leaves room for the reader to believe she is suggesting that giving an organization the key to easily conquering the world might be a mistake, that "The Snowball Effect" is a horror story rather than a utopian story.           

"Tea Tray in the Sky" by Evelyn E. Smith

This story, the story that brought us to this issue of Galaxy, is a long plot-light satire of television, advertising, the metastasizing of the Christmas season far beyond December 24th and 25th, and, most importantly, the cult of tolerance and perhaps mass immigration.  We might say the story is about the internal contradictions of Western liberalism, or democratic capitalism, or whatever we want to call the ideology, mores and norms of the mid-20th-century United States.

It is the future of intergalactic civilization.  The human race is in intimate daily contact with dozens of other intelligent species.  In the interest of tolerance, the taboos (spelled here "tabus") of all races are enforced by law almost everywhere in the populated universe.  For example, in New York City on Earth, if you want to eat you have to do so very discretely, alone and out of sight, because one race of aliens finds eating as gauche to talk about and as private a matter as you or I might consider defecating.  Everyone in the inhabited universe must wear gloves and a hat because there are races of aliens who never show their fingers or the tops of their heads.  And so on--Smith gives many examples.  Perhaps most alarming is the outlawing of monogamy--marriage is forbidden, free love is mandatory.  There are, apparently, government spies and informers everywhere who will make sure you are thrown in prison for uttering any one of the verboten expressions or or performing any of the forbidden behaviors inscribed on the ever-expanding list of taboos imported from every cover of the known universe.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young man who has spent his entire life in a sort of monastery or retreat in California, having been brought there as a young child.  Before advancing to the next level of membership in "the Brotherhood," he has decided to see what life is like in the mainstream world.  He takes an airplane ride to New York, and "Tea Tray in the Sky" story describes his experience of culture shock, offering us one farcical joke after another.  Besides all the wacky taboos, there is the fact that it is July, and New York is covered in red and green decorations because Christmas is approaching, and, more importantly, the ubiquity of television; TVs are everywhere, pumping out hard-sell advertising, and it is illegal to turn them off, as that would be an infringement of free enterprise.  This society is strongly committed to free trade and the market economy--the word "tariff" is a dirty one and price controls are not exercised.    

"Tea Tray in the Sky" seems to dramatize how some liberal values, like market economics, tolerance, freedom of movement, if pursued and defended to the nth degree, can infringe on other liberal values, like free speech and freedom of association.  Smith's story may also express the annoyance of publishers and broadcasters at having to craft their content with an eye to not offending religious people and anti-communists, and maybe even frustration at the way average white Americans may have been expected to alter their behavior to accommodate blacks and immigrants.

Anyway, the protagonist, after experiencing a New York full of aliens of all types where you can't get married or eat in public and where you have to scrupulously watch what you say and you can't even walk more than two hundred yards because the sight of you strolling around may trigger depression in aliens who have no feet, decides to return to the Brotherhood, where, and I guess this is sort of a twist ending, there are human female residents as well as human male, so he can cultivate the sort of sexual relationship and family life considered normal in the 1950s USA.

"Tea Tray in the Sky" is sort of interesting as an historical document, in particular because issues like mass immigration and tariffs and infringements on free speech in the interest of tolerance are so central to the politics of Western nations today in the Trump Era.  But as a piece of fiction it is not terribly compelling, it being variations on the same few jokes--bizarre taboos and annoying TV commercials--repeated again and again.  

Another acceptable story.  

H. L. Gold included "Tea Tray in the Sky" in the Second Galaxy Reader along with MacLean's "Snowball Effect."  The story would reappear in the 21st century in Smith collections and in an anthology of stories from Galaxy penned by women.  

"The Mousetrap" by Gordon R. Dickson

"Hard to believe," Trigger observed, "that a sort of leech-looking thing could distinguish between people."

"This one can.  Do you get any sensations while holding it?"

"Sensations?"  She considered.  "Nothing particular.  It's just like I said the other time--little Repulsive is rather nice to feel."

"For you," he said.  "I didn't tell you everything."

"You rarely do," Trigger remarked.

Let's read from another science fiction anthology courtesy of the magic of the internet archive.  I guess Frederik Pohl's 1954 Assignment in Tomorrow first came to my attention in January, when I read Theodore Sturgeon's "Mr. Costello, Hero" in my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange. Assignment in Tomorrow reprints "Mr. Costello, Hero" and fifteen other stories, many of which are by people in whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are interested.  Today let's check out three, those by that guy who writes adventure stories about the ray-gun-toting heroines of the future, James H. Schmitz, the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold, and detective writer Fredric Brown.

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" by James H. Schmitz (1953)

Pohl in his intro to "We Don't Want Any Trouble" here in Assignment in Tomorrow says that the title story of Agent of Vega, a collection I read back in 2016, is "brilliant as a nova."  (I concluded my own analysis of "Agent of Vega" with the declaration that it was "not bad, not great.")  Pohl then assures us that this story here, which debuted in Gold's Galaxy, is "brighter still."  Well, let's see.

OK, this is an acceptable horror story.  More brilliant than a nova?  Not in my book.

A zoologist comes home to his wife to tell her the astounding news--he has been among the important men who interviewed a space alien!  This alien was like a frog man or lizard man, and a government intelligence officer and a bunch of scientists and politicians interrogated it.  All these important representatives of the American establishment were consumed by irrational negative feelings towards the alien, irresistible fear and undeniable detestation.  So disturbed was the zoologist that he could barely look at the alien and certainly couldn't come up with rational questions to ask it.  Our guy almost fainted when the alien's eyes fell upon him--only his fear of embarrassment in front of a blonde woman, the intelligence man's fiancé, there to take notes, kept him from swooning.

The eggheads were at a loss, but the intelligence man was a man of action and when the alien refused to answer questions he threatened the reptilian creature with torture and death.  The alien explained that his people are immune to pain and even death, and will do whatever they want on Earth, probably just act as tourists.  The E.T. was haughty and contemptuous of our civilization.

The intelligence man, hysterical, whipped out his pistol and gunned the alien down; his comrades wrested his gun from him.  Then the spook's hot fiancée stood up from where she was taking notes to strip naked!  The aliens are immune from death because they can move their consciousness from one body to another with trivial ease!  The intelligence man snatches another pistol, but is immediately shot dead himself by one of his fellows--no one can ever know if he intended to fire upon his fiancée's possessed body, or commit suicide.

As the story ends the zoologist speculates on how much human society will be altered by the alien tourists.  How many of these invasive tourists will there be?  And how long will they want to occupy a human body?  Will they be a minor inconvenience, or ruin lives and revolutionize society?

"We Don't Want Any Trouble" may remind readers of John D. MacDonald's The Wine of the Dreamers (1951) and Robert Silverberg's "Passengers" (1967) and probably some other things not coming to mind at the moment in which aliens take vacations (our English friends might say "'olidays") in our bodies. 

After first being reprinted here in Pohl's anthology, "We Don't Want Any Trouble," would go on to reappear in multiple American and foreign anthologies and in the Schmitz collection Eternal Frontier.

"A Matter of Form" by H. L. Gold (1938)

Some of the editors of the big SF magazines are as wacky as any of the big name SF writers, are writers in the own right, and should perhaps be seen as collaborators with the most honored SF writers, having workshopped ideas with them and guided them in developing plots, styles and themes.  At least that is the nice way of putting it--others who are less charitable have seen the big SF editors in question as self-important dictators who arrogantly interfered with the work of the writers whose fiction filled their magazines.  Either way, H. L. Gold of Galaxy and John W. Campbell, Jr. of Astounding are odd, perhaps tragic, perhaps reprehensible, characters who, for better or worse depending on your point of view, worked closely with the most prominent SF writers and played a pivotal role in shaping their work and the entire SF field.  Here in "A Matter of Form" we have a story by Gold that debuted in Campbell's essential magazine over ten years before Galaxy appeared on the scene, a story that has been reprinted many times in anthologies edited by such men as Isaac Asimov (with the help of Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, of course) and Groff Conklin and in our own wacky 21st century in the Gold collection Perfect Murders: Detective Mysteries.

"Detective Mysteries?", you ask?  Yes, indeed.  "A Matter of Form" has the tone and atmosphere of a noirish hard-boiled detective story.  Set in New York City during the Depression, Gold's story is populated by educated people who are either down and out and suffering or living high on the hog through the proceeds of their diabolical criminal enterprises.  Our initial protagonist is a brilliant newsman, tall and skinny Gilroy, who, when he isn't bitching about how much he hates the septuagenarian rich guy, Talbot, who is half-owner of the newspaper, and relishing Talbot's imminent demise, is investigating the mysterious appearance on the streets of men, apparently unidentifiable bums with no local connections, who are catatonic and/or paralyzed.  What happened to these jokers?  Well, all of them have surgical wounds on the backs of their necks--could some mad scientist be experimenting on these poor bastards?  And why is the top surgeon at the hospital where the latest catatonic/paralytic ended up, Moss, famously a ruthless jerk, quitting his job of hospital director?

The narrative focus shifts to the adventures of Wood, formerly employed "in a stock-broker's office" as a "code expert" or "code translator," now spending his time on the streets, clad in rags, unable to find work.  Wood gets bamboozled by a bogus job offer and falls into the clutches of Moss and Talbot; Moss, it turns out, is experimenting on vulnerable men who lack families and connections in his quest to develop a means of moving people's consciousnesses from one body to another!  His research is supported by Talbot, who hopes Moss will fit him out with a fresh young body, his cis-body having a weak heart and scheduled to expire at any moment!  Moss has learned that to accomplish these identity shifts you don't have to move the entire brain, just a tiny little bit near where the brain meets the spine--this is where identity resides.  (Who knew?)  The unsuspecting Wood soon finds himself in the body of a dog!  In the same room is his old human body crawling around on all fours, it being animated by the consciousness of the dog.  

Gold's journalist and criminal scenes are pretty conventional, but the scenes of the man in a dog's body, fighting his way out of Moss's lab and evading capture by Talbot's flunkies and by the police, are pretty good--Gold's description of a human being's response to living the life of a carnivorous quadruped, of experiencing firsthand a dog's instinctive reactions to stimuli, are good speculative fiction.  It would be easy to give these portions of the book a thumbs up.  The sequences in which Wood, the code expert in a dog's body, strives to contact Gilroy the crusading journalo are not bad, and are fully in the tradition of science fiction that teaches you cool stuff (in this case, cryptography) and portrays people using logic and knowledge to overcome problems; unfortunately these scenes are repetitive and feel pretty long.  In fact, the entire story, which is like 60 pages in Assignment in Tomorrow, feels kind of long and repetitive, the characters doing and saying the same kinds of things again and again.

Another problem with "A Matter of Form" is the weak ending.  We follow Wood (in a dog's body) and Gilroy, accompanied by Gilroy's editor, a sort of superfluous but ever-present sidekick character, through a long sequence of climbing buildings and sneaking around which ends with a confrontation with Talbot and Moss.  Talbot dies of a heart attack in the excitement and, after long scenes of Moss showing contempt for his captors, Wood uses his dog body to just kill the defenseless mad scientist.

With Moss, the only man able to perform the identity transplant operation he pioneered, dead, Wood is  stuck in the dog body.  He and Gilroy get rich performing on stage and in Hollywood.  Gold talks about how Wood is sad and defeated, wishing he could live as a man again, which I think would have been a good moody ending for a hard-boiled detective story that is also an attack on our bourgeois capitalist society--all the money in the world can't make you happy if you are a second class citizen, if you have lost your humanity!  But Gold cops out and has Wood, in a way that is totally inexplicable and Gold does not even try to explain, return to his human body after a year as a pooch.  Lame!  

The plot of Gold's "A Matter of Form" is about as obvious and familiar as that of Schmitz's "We Don't Want Any Trouble," but Gold's story has a style, an atmosphere and an ideology, making it more engaging, even if I'm not impressed by the ideology--the story is suffused with the hatred of the middle-class smarty pants for the upper-middle class as well as that of the self-important creative type for those who work for money; presumably this endeared the story to Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League.  Gold lays the atmosphere and ideology on pretty thick, having the reporter denounce Talbot again and again, and telling us again and again about Wood's worn shoes and unshaven face, contrasting his down and out mug with Moss's perfect shave, but a loud personality is better than no personality.  And the story does come to life in the action scenes in which the code expert has to learn how to operate a dog's body tout suite.  So we'll judge "A Matter of Form" marginally good, a notch above Schmitz's story; you commies out there will probably want to crank that up a few more notches.  

For more H. L. Gold coverage here at MPorcius Fiction Log, check out my blogpost on "No Medals,"  another story about poverty and a mad scientist practicing weird medicine, and "Trouble with Water," which is full of ethnic and sex stereotypes.

"Hall of Mirrors" by Fredric Brown (1953)

Here's another story from Gold's Galaxy--it's H. L. Gold day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fredric Brown's "Hall of Mirrors" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a Christmas joke cover--Christmas covers and joke covers always make me groan.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we like blood and guts, sex and violence, thrills and chills, not Santa Claus and yukking it up. 

British paperback editions of More Than Superhuman; the 1980 printing (right) illustrates "The Reflected Men," which we talked about last time

Today we read the second half of my 1971 Dell printing of the A. E. van Vogt collection More Than Superhuman, striding into the arena to wrestle with four more stories by the Canadian madman, two of them collaborations!  In this tag team match will Forrest J. Ackerman and James Schmitz be on our side, aiding our efforts to grab a hold of our man Van's at times slippery or prickly prose and pin down his unforgettable nova concepts, or will they instead just compound the difficulties faced by those of us bold enough to thrown down with the Slan Man?

"All the Loving Androids" (1971)

It looks like this approximately 35-page story was original to this collection.  "All the Loving Androids" would go on to be included in some European van Vogt collections.

Dan Thaler is a physicist working for the government in the future of visi-phones, aircars, and human-like androids.  He is currently on a secret assignment--the government suspects something odd is going on with the androids, and Dan is discreetly investigating.  As "All the Loving Androids" begins, an opportunity to learn about the cutting edge in grey-market androids falls right into Dan's lap.  Dan's sister Anita is married to busy businessman Peter Copeland, and according to this dude Anita is "the worst neurotic of all time and space"; she calls him up at the office multiple times a day, gives him long lists of errands to run, and if he should hesitate to bow to her every whim, threatens to kill herself.  So, Peter acquired two androids that looked exactly like him to occupy Anita, one running all those errands and the other answering the phone so he had time to get his work done and conduct an extramarital affair.  When Anita takes an overdose of sleeping pills, the cops and Dan meet Peter's android stand-ins and they are amazed by their high quality--most androids are immediately recognizable as robots thanks to their not-quite-lifelike movements, but these two can successfully pass for human!

Dan the man, with the help of a cop, figures out that at the bottom of all this is a conspiracy that reaches into the government bureaucracy and the highest level of the professions--the Establishment is riddled with people who support android civil rights and some of them are willing to commit murder to win equality for androids or even go so far as to actually make the androids our masters!  One such ally of the androids is Anita's shrink--this joker hypnotized Anita into being a terrible wife so the android liberation people could sell three of the new super androids to Peter!  That's right, three androids--the "woman" Peter is conducting an extramarital affair with is a physical duplicate of Anita who is a conscientious homemaker and an eager sex partner!  All proceeds of such superandroid sales go to financing the android uprising!  

Dan gets captured by the android liberation organization; they hypnotize him and he briefly lives an android-like existence, slavishly obedient and unable to do anything for which he has not been programmed.  Luckily the police rescue him and capture the diabolical android-boosting psychiatrist.

The climax of "All the Loving Androids" is not what I expected--I had expected all the androids to be wiped out and humans being forced to get along without them, or, some kind of negotiations which would improve the position of androids in society.  Instead, Van concludes the story with a sort of joke that is perhaps commentary on sexual relationships.  The real Anita, freed from the hypnosis that made her so impossible to get along with, takes the place of the Anita android and has the Anita robot put in the loony bin in her place.  She insists that Dan not tell Peter about the substitutions; presumably Peter and Anita live happily ever after, Anita being such a helpful wife that Peter does not realize she is the human he married and not the robot he recently purchased.  The final punchline is the reflections of the cop who helped Dan--he envies Peter for having an accommodating, even robotic wife because his own wife is such a pain in the neck.  Whether Van's joke is supposed to make a feminist or anti-feminist point here is not clear.  

"All the Loving Androids" is an acceptable filler story, no big deal.  The plot sort of reminds me of the plots we see in Jack Vance stories, but of course van Vogt can't match Vance's superior writing style, which makes Vance's stories founded on such plots so entertaining.

"Laugh, Clone, Laugh" (1969) with Forrest J. Ackerman

Back in late 2021 I read Forrest J. Ackerman's collaboration with C. L. Moore, "Nymph of Darkness," and was astonished and actually angered by how poor it was.  So my hopes of finding "Laugh, Clone, Laugh" palatable are not high.  

This story, five pages, is a sterile waste of time, a lame sort of fairy story punctuated with weak jokes that culminates in a bad pun.  Thumbs down.  It is better than "Nymph of Darkness," because, whereas "Nymph of Darkness" failed to achieve its goals, "Laugh, Clone, Laugh" accomplishes its purpose, having set its sights very very low.

This pointless exercise first saw print in the collection Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest J Ackerman & Friends.  There is a lot of evidence that many members of the SF community found Ackerman to be a fun guy and he seems to have had a boundless enthusiasm for speculative fiction, but in my experience his actual writing is shallow at best, and often quite irritating.

"Research Alpha" (1965) with James H. Schmitz

Schmitz is actually good at writing SF adventure stories with interesting aliens,* so I have been looking forward to reading this one.  "Research Alpha" first appeared in If, and appeared in translation within a year in two different European magazines, including Urania, the Karel Thole cover of which illustrates the opening scene of the story.

Tall and slim Barbara Ellington recently started working as a typist at Research Alpha, one of the world's most important scientific institutions.  She is dating Vincent Strather, a technician in the photo lab, though she seems to have a crush on John Hammond, president of Research Alpha.  Barbara has also caught the eye of the head of the biology department, Dr. Henry Gloge, who selects Barbara and Vincent to be the subjects of his latest experiment!  

My understanding of evolution (and I am admittedly an ignoramus) is that it is an unpredictable process driven by random mutations that, should they not cripple the ability to produce offspring, are passed on to an individual's descendants and will become widespread should they confer some advantage in the struggle to reproduce; over many generations, new species emerge from this process.  But often in SF stories we see evolution portrayed as a predictable process, as if what your descendants will look like is already mapped out in your genes, and if we bathe you in radiation or shoot you full of drugs you can graduate early, skipping a hundred or a thousand or a million generations and taking on an advanced form.†  "Research Alpha" is one of these stories.  Dr. Gloge has been injecting the giant salamanders known as "hellbenders" with a drug that advances their evolution by hundreds of thousands of years, so that they grow armor and better eyesight and so forth.  He wants to figure out what will happen if he uses the drug on human beings, and so he injects Barbara and Vincent--absolutely without their consent or even knowledge, or that of his boss, president Hammond--and rigs up surveillance in their private off-campus apartments so he can keep tabs on them.

A three-sided conflict featuring shifting alliances and a whole panoply of superpowers and high tech equipment ensues among Barbara, who, as we expect of a van Vogt protagonist, gradually acquires and masters mind-boggling mental abilities; the ruthless Dr. Gloge; and Hammond, who, unsurprisingly to us VV fans, is an extraterrestrial, one of those here on Earth pulling strings behind the scenes to manipulate human civilization.  Will Barbara use her superpowers to become leader of Earth, give all of us superpowers, and throw off the influence of the aliens?  Or will she recognize the wisdom of the aliens and leave Earth behind to join the god-like galactics who are Hammond's superiors?

This is a pretty good thriller with a sense-of-wonder ending as Barbara achieves "Point Omega:" "when man becomes one with the ultimate."  I like it.    

*Here are links to my comments on some Schmitz productions I liked: "Planet of Forgetting," "Greenface," "Grandpa," and The Demon Breed.

†My go-to example is Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved," but see also Henry Kuttner's "What Hath Me?"  

"Him" (1969)

"Research Alpha" takes up like 60 pages, but "Him" is a short one, just five pages of text.  It debuted in Spaceway, a magazine that, at that time, consisted mostly of reprints of 1950s material; among this issue's new material is a long wordplay-filled letter from Forrest J. Ackerman in which he, among other things, suggests if a movie were to be made of Sibyl Sue Blue, which we read back in November, the lead role should go to Nancy Sinatra.            

"Him" is a merely acceptable filler story.  Most of the Earth is under the control of dictator Josiah Him, but considerable portions of Western North America resist his rule, even repelling a full scale invasion.  One of Him's screwy policies is to have educated people--college professors, scientists, and the like--ground up and fed to students; this is called the "planarian education plan," it being ostensibly based on that famous(ly controversial) scientific finding that planarian worms can acquire memories of their fellows whom they eat.  The plot of this story follows the dictator's top brewer as he is chosen to be ground up and fed to aspiring brewers, and discovers that his death sentence is in fact part of a rebel plot to overthrow Him.

Slight; an unfortunate way to conclude the collection.

"Him" would reappear in the program book of the 1992 MagiCon held in Orlando.

**********

Another adventure successfully concluded.  Stay tuned for more explorations of mid-century SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.