Groff Conklin's 1953 paperback anthology Crossroads in Time recently came to my attention when we read from it Hal Clement's story "Assumption Unjustified."  This volume of 312 pages is full of stories by writers we are interested in that, for one reason or another, we haven't read yet.  (I will here note that we have, in fact, already read the included story by Margaret St. Clair, "Thirsty God" as well as Clement's story.)  Today let's read from this book five stories that debuted in Astounding.  I will be reading them in a scan of this 1953 paperback with the awesome Richard Powers cover, though I may consult other versions if I suspect a typo or printing error.

"Courtesy" by Clifford D. Simak (1951)

In our last thrilling expedition into the world of magazines printed before we were born we read three stories printed in Astounding that were penned by Clifford D. Simak, the newspaperman famed for writing "pastoral" science fiction, and here's a fourth.  One of those three stories stole my heart and one of them had me tearing out my hair, so as I begin "Courtesy" I have no idea how I will react to it.

This is one of those SF stories that condemns the human race and presents goody goody aliens who are better than us to serve as a contrast to our vileness.  I'm going to call it acceptable because it is well-written and suspenseful, but the ending is a groaner.  Simak has produced a lot of fiction like this, with ants, dogs, robots all proving better than humans, and Native Americans proving better than white people, and I don't find the theme persuasive or entertaining.

"Courtesy" tells the tale of an expedition to a barren alien planet.  The expedition has twenty-five members, and we meet a few of them and Simak does a good job sketching out their personalities and relationships--like I said, this story, the theme of which and the plot resolution of which I think are crummy, is pretty well-written.  We learn that humans have explored many habitable alien planets, but everywhere they go, the natives hate the humans.  Most of the text of the story involves a guy who stupidly leaves the camp and gets lost, and then how everybody in the expedition, which won't be able to contact any other humans for two years, catches the lethal local plague because the medical officer stupidly didn't check the expedition's drugs before or soon after landing and it turns out the drugs are expired, useless.

Only one man of the 25 survives the plague, and the reason he survives reveals why all aliens hate us humies.  We humies are all arrogant and think we are better than aliens!  The aliens on this planet, naked savages with no technology or literature, have the power to cure people, and they cured the one guy who will survive the plague because he was the only human to show any common courtesy to any of the natives.

The idea that all humans would be arrogant all over the galaxy and all natives resent the humans is silly, because, as Simak seemed to know when he wrote "Ogre" in 1944, interactions between advanced colonial and imperial societies and less advanced indigenes are complex and diverse--sure, plenty of ancient Romans and early modern Europeans who went out to the provinces and colonies looked down on the natives and plenty of natives hated them in return, but significant numbers of the colonizers liked and admired the natives and even "went native" and significant numbers of natives were eager to collaborate or emulate or imitate the colonizers.

You can find this professionally produced but ultimately frustrating and sterile exercise in several anthologies as well as multiple Simak collections.

"The Mutant's Brother" by Fritz Leiber (1943)
"The Cave" by P. Schuyler Miller (1943)

As was foretold, today we read "Ogre," Clifford Simak's contribution to the January 1944 issue of Astounding.  (We've already read the A. E. van Vogt, Frank Belknap Long, Hal Clement and P. Schuyler Miller fiction in this issue of John W. Campbell's genre-defining magazine.)  We'll also take a look at two other Astounding pieces by Simak, "Lobby," another 1944 story, and 1949's "Eternity Lost."  I'm reading all of these stories in scans of the issues of Astounding in which they debuted.

"Ogre" (1944)

Here we have a story full of great science fiction ideas, ideas that exploit and reflect our fears of loneliness as well as of loss of individuality, our fascination with art and our vulnerability to dangerous addictions, our dreams of perfect health and concerns over who and what determines our true identities--does our blood or the place we were born determine who we are, or can we adopt piecemeal or in toto the culture of people of other races and civilizations?  "Ogre" also reminds us of all those Somerset Maugham stories about Westerners out in the colonies, trying to make a buck, dealing with the inscrutable natives and running the risk of--or embracing the thrill of--going native.  Well-written and fun at the same time it tackles these issues of identity and imperialism, with "Ogre" we are starting off this blog post with a hit--thumbs up!

"Ogre" has many characters but almost all of them have personalities and strong motivations so they aren't hard to tell apart and most of them provide drama or entertainment and/or offer illustrations of the story's themes.  "Ogre" is set on a planet where plants developed intelligence and animal-like mobility.  Native to this world are plants like sheets or cloaks that can crawl around and can tap into the brain activity of any other living thing they touch.  When humans arrived on the planet these things, called "blankets" throughout the story, were thrilled to develop a symbiotic relationship with Earthers, because these blankets have naturally dim wits and dull lives, but connected to a man they suddenly had deep feelings and the ability for complex thought.  Humans embraced these relationships because the blankets have super-efficient physiologies and can absorb energy directly from the environment, heal quickly and fend of disease with ease, and when touching a human they can share these abilities with him--a man with a blanket need not eat, and can quickly recover from any kind of injury or infection, beyond having a constant companion who shares his attitudes and goals.

The blankets are kind of like non-white individuals during the ages of exploration and imperialism who take on the culture of white colonists, subalterns who embrace service to their technological superiors.  Simak in "Ogre" also dramatizes the opposite sort of relationship, the colonist who goes native.  Among the many other types of sentient plants on this vegetable-dominated planet are trees that produce music of staggering beauty.  Much money can be made by human merchants who can record this music and sell it to Earthers living around the galaxy.  But there is a risk to this music--it is so beautiful that humans can become addicted to it and neglect their health and abandon all social norms as they become obsessed with it.  A major component of the plot of the story is the behavior of a man who becomes obsessed in this way, and another plot strand involves one of the intelligent ambulatory plants--probably the most intelligent of them--who hatches a scheme to use the trees to become master of the human race.

With all these plants who want to become like men and men who fall under the sway of plants we have , multiple examples of entities of one culture or species who desire to, or risk being forced to, take on elements of the identities of another culture or race.  And there's more!  We also have an iteration of a characteristic Simak character--the sympathetic robot who is probably "better" than humans but who yearns to be considered human.  This robot is at the Earth trading post at the behest of the interstellar business enterprise that owns the post, charged with the mission of making sure the humans working for the corporation do not steal or otherwise misuse and waste the corporation's resources and ensuring compliance with the many company rules and government regulations that govern the company and its employees.  This robot plays the role of a comic relief character--it even has bad grammar--but is also the hero of the story, being more honest, more brave, better at fighting, etc., than the rest of the cast.  This character brings a lot to the story, but I will warn my 21st-century readers that this character may be modelled on and intended to remind readers of stereotypes of nagging women and African-American subalterns, and the robot does use the dreaded "N-word," the word people of my ancestry use nowadays only at great risk, in the cliche "n----- in the woodpile."

Looking beyond the numerous humans and the various types of plants, plus the robot, this planet is also the site of a rival trading post to that of the Earthers, an outpost of evil insectoids from another space faring civilization.  This story offers multiple examples of what some of the characters consider treason to the race, and one of them is provided by a human who joins the insect people in an operation against the interests of the Earth station.

As for the plot of "Ogre," I won't get too far into it except to say it is full of incident--dangerous journeys, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, monster attacks, double crosses, schemes that offer tremendous wealth and threaten entire civilizations.  Simak handles all this material ably--the fighting and scheming is entertaining and exciting and the comic relief and serious themes of the story work in concert with the action-adventure material instead of undermining or sidelining it.        

I can't think of anything bad to say about "Ogre."  A very fine piece of work.  Highly recommended to anybody with any interest in popular fiction.  

After its debut in this terrific issue of Astounding, "Ogre" reappeared in Donald Wollheim's Adventures on Other Planets, multiple European anthologies, multiple "Best of Astounding /Analog" volumes, and several Simak collections.  

"Lobby" (1944)

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories by authors whose names begin with "S" that were published in 1958 and recommended by every New York newspaper's favorite SF anthologist, Judith Merril.  Last time we read stories by Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley.  Today we've got stories by two big names in the SF world, Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak.

"The Man Who Never Forgot" by Robert Silverberg

"The Man Who Never Forgot" debuted in an issue of F&SF with a story by Poul Anderson we read back in 2021, "The Last of the Deliverers," and stories we have yet to consume by Chad Oliver and Avram Davidson. [UPDATE 4/30/2025: Further research indicates I read the Avram Davidson story in question, "I Do Not Hear You, Sir," back in 2018.  Oops.]  Maybe we'll come back to this ish soon.   

I talk too much about how SF readers want to simultaneously be members of an oppressed minority and members of an elite with special powers--I just did it in my last blog post--but here we have another example.  The protagonist of "The Man Who Never Forgot" has super intelligence and a super memory and this causes others to resent him, to make fun of him, to shun him.  He leaves home in his early teens to travel the country, forging no long-term relationships as he moves from city to city, state to state.  

Around age 30, by chance, he encounters his mother and realizes he has changed, that he has grown up--maybe he can have normal healthy relationships, build a family, contribute to the world.  "The Man Who Never Forgot" has a happy ending, but one more like that of a realistic and mature piece of literature than that of a run-of-the-mill SF story--instead of resolving the plot by going on a campaign of revenge or leading a paradigm-shifting revolution that changes the world, the protagonist changes himself.  Good advice for all you angry young men out there!

"The Man Who Never Forgot" is more like a character study then an actual story, and the plot just sort of resolves itself, but Silverberg's story is an engaging and smooth read nonetheless.  Grade: the high end of acceptable.

Silverberg included "The Man Who Never Forgot" in the 1974 anthology he edited, Mutants, and it has appeared in a few other anthologies as well in addition to numerous Silverberg collections.

"Slice of Life" by Robert Silverberg

This baby debuted (under the Calvin Knox pseudonym) in the same issue of Infinity which offers a story by John Bernard Daley which we've already read, "Wings of the Phoenix," and a Clifford Simak story we are about to read.  Merril was really into this issue of Infinity!

Here we have a story that questions the desirability of utopia and also romanticizes the figure of the great artist, and yet again depicts with sympathy the alienated young person who is superior to the common run of humanity.  "Slice of Life" is about as good a read as "The Man Who Forgot Everything," but the plot works better because a main character faces a dilemma and must make a difficult decision.

It is the future!  Not only is everybody healthy and happy, but everybody has empathic psychic powers and their ability to sense other people's emotions facilitates healthy human relationships.  But little Danny, eleven years old, three years ago fell out a fifth-floor window and his leg bones were smashed to bits--he has been bedridden ever since--and lost his psychic abilities!  Cut off from psychic rapport with other people, Danny has almost entirely stopped communicating with other people, and he doesn't read books or listen to music either--he just sits in bed all day and daydreams, just grunting in response to his parents' efforts to speak to him. 

A therapist comes to visit Danny, hoping to cure his psychic disability.  (Don't worry about his leg--this is the future and as soon as he is fully grown they'll saw that thing off and give him a robot leg.)  The therapist realizes Danny has constructed an elaborately detailed dreamworld where he has adventures with a wide cast of characters.  The headshrinker is astonished by how vivid and thrilling is the fantasy world Danny has conceived; Danny, he realizes, is one of the world's great artists!  Such artists have been few and far between since modern society became as peaceful and stable as it is today, because the minds of great artists are generally some cocktail of unhappiness, ill-health, alienation, and perversion.  The therapist thinks of Beethoven ("deaf"), Mozart ("a sickly pauper"), Leonardo and Shakespeare ("sexual deviates")--seeing as today there is no poverty, no physical illness, no mental illness, there are today no Beethovens, Mozarts, Leonardos or Shakespeares!  The therapist is confident he can bring back Danny's psychic powers, but he is equally confident that if he neglects to cure Danny, the kid will become the greatest artist of the age and produce work that will delight millions!  So he lies to Danny's parents, saying he can't cure the boy, but assures them that their son will grow into a great man.

"Slice of Life" has not been reprinted widely, even though Merril really liked it and I think it is fine; besides Infinity it looks like it only ever saw print in John Carnell's New Worlds.

"Leg. Forst." by Clifford Simak

So we move to the second "S"-man we'll be talking about today, Clifford Simak, and our second story today from the April issue of Infinity.  I like Simak but his anti-city and pro-primitivism (people call this "pastoralism," I guess) attitude can get on my nerves.  (I do not think the world would be a better place if all the humans except some Plains Indians died and the Earth was taken over by robots, intelligent dogs and intelligent ants.)  Well, let's see if Simak is pushing some wacky line with this story, which certainly has a wacky title.

It is about two thousand years in the future.  The human race has expanded throughout the galaxy, and today has commercial relationships with untold numbers of alien civilizations.  

Our hero is a widower who, following retirement from business as an interstellar importer/exporter (he was a pretty sharp dealer, he'll have you know) and the death of his wife, took up stamp collecting--with a passion!  Over the last twenty years he has amassed a first-class collection of stamps from all over the galaxy as well as deep knowledge about the stamps of many nonhuman races, even though his only living relative, a nephew who himself is trying to make it in the business world, and his nosy neighbors are always trying to waste his time.

The plot of "Leg. Forst.," a story of almost forty pages, has many moving parts, but they all move smoothly together and make internal sense and all aspects of the plot are pretty entertaining.  Even if the idea of stamps being used to pay for the shipping of documents and goods between solar systems is kind of silly, it and other SF concepts in the story are fun, and Simak's light and pleasant style carries you along and soothes away any desire you might have to pick apart the logic of the story.

To put it briefly, a series of coincidences involving traditional comic elements--a buttinski widow who is trying to seduce the stamp collector with her cooking; a woman who is scared by a mouse; an absent-minded old hobbyist whose apartment is an absolute mess of clutter and who is clumsy enough to spill broth on a rare stamp--leads to a world-wide paradigm shift when the stamp collector and his nephew accidentally revive, and then in pursuit of profit intentionally propagate, intelligent alien spores which can read minds and which have a passion for order.  Employing their amazing telekinetic and telepathic powers, these spores not only render the physical Earth neat, tidy and efficient, but also the social and political Earth, compelling people to behave honestly and generously.  The stamp collector, who has contacts all over the galaxy, enjoys access to an antidote to the spores' effects which will allow him to continue behaving selfishly when he feels like it, giving him a leg up on every other Terran.

Thumbs up for this fun and creative story.  Maybe Merril liked "Leg. Forst." because it is fun, or maybe because it serves as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for leftists who dream of some deus ex machina power reining in business people and making the entire human race toe a line.  Either way, a good choice on Merril's part.

"Leg. Forst." would go on to be reprinted in quite a few Simak collections.

"The Big Front Yard" by Clifford Simak  

This Astounding cover story won a Hugo, so has the endorsement not only of the idiosyncratic Merril but a sizable contingent of the active SF community.  (We've already read a story from this issue of John W. Campbell Jr.'s genre-dominating magazine, Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword," which we mildly recommended.)  

"The Big Front Yard" bears some similarity to "Leg. Forst."  There's the protagonist, a charming sort of rascal.  And the aliens who help him out, unbidden and by surprise.  And humans who seek to profit by the aliens' special abilities.  And the ending in which Earth life is going to be irrevocably changed thanks not the the action of the government but relatively humble small business people.

Our protagonist is a handyman and antiques dealer in the upper mid west--people keep calling him a "Yankee" and implying a "Yankee" is a serious sharp efficiency-minded businessman who gets good deals by skillful "dickering."  Simak also portrays the handyman as a good person who treats people fairly and loves his dog to death and would do anything for this beast, and as a man jealous of his liberties when it looks like the government is going to trample on him, and a man with a spiritual connection to his ancestral home.  (This dude is alike an amalgam of stereotypes of the sympathetic American, or what Americans like to think of themselves as, at least before America became a nation of obese pot-smoking porn-addicts.)  

Weird, but welcome, stuff starts happening around the house.  For example, a black and white TV our hero was supposed to fix for the wife of the richest man in town gets fixed while he isn't looking and now can receive color images--images more clear than any color TV reception the richest man in town has ever seen.  Moneybags owns a computer factory and wants to bring the TV to his factory to see if his techs can figure out what makes the improved TV tick so he and the handyman can get rich off this new technology.

The mysterious unseen aliens fix other broken stuff, and eventually construct a star-system spanning portal inside the handyman's beloved old house.  The handyman, if he steps out his back door, finds himself in America as usual, but if he steps out the front door he is in a desert on an alien world.  

This is a longish story and there are little subplots but the main thrust of the story is that the handyman, a man of business who loves to make a profit but who recognizes that good business is based on knowing how to treat people, proves better able to deal with the aliens who eventually show up (and are also serious but essentially fair-minded business people) than do the government people who invade the town when the world becomes aware of the portal, and, because the portal between worlds is on his property, and the only man available who can talk directly to the aliens is the local dimwit who happens to be a telepath (and whom only one man in town--the handyman--ever treated decently), the government people have to let the handyman take the lead in handling Earth's interstellar diplomatic and commercial efforts.    

I like the story's ideology and its speculations on the nature of interstellar trade, and the characters and their relationships are pretty good, so even though the aliens themselves are a little too cutesy, thumbs up for "The Big Front Yard."  When Simak soft pedals his pastoralism--just portraying small town people in a positive light and confining his attacks on city folk to government lackeys--his work is fun.  A good pick by Merril and an understandable Hugo win (it beat Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers," C. M. Kornbluth's "Shark Ship," Fritz Leiber's "Deskful of Girls" and Pauline Ashwell's "Unwillingly to School" among other novelettes I haven't read.)  "The Big Front Yard" would be reprinted in many anthologies and Simak collections.

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I can't disagree with Merril's picks here, which is nice.  We also might see these stories as good representatives of their authors' bodies of work.  One of Silverberg's most acclaimed novels, Dying Inside, is about the psychological life of a psychic, his use of his powers and how it affects his relationships and how he responds as he starts losing his powers.  (I read Dying Inside while I lived in New York, when my meat space life was interesting enough that I would never have started a blog, and I recommend it--I mean the novel, not just living in New York.)  The Simak stories share the concerns of Golden Age science fiction (Simak started his career in the early 1930s) with paradigm shifts and new technologies and human interactions with aliens, while also forefronting the lives and relationships of simple (on the surface as least) "down home" characters and subtly attacking the elites in Washington and elsewhere.

Let's hope out next batch of 1958 stories by "S" authors is as comfortable as this one!

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"S" is only the latest letter in our long alphabetical march through the honorable mentions list at the back of the fourth of Judith Merril's "Best of" anthologies.  Here find links to the previous stops on our campaign, those from from A to R.

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax

In our last episode we read the 1956 version of Eric Frank Russell's story "Legwork."  "Legwork" would be reprinted in 1965 in the Groff Conklin anthology 5 Unearthly Visions, a copy of which I acquired down in Lexington, Kentucky in April of 2016.  5 Unearthly Visions also reprints Damon Knight's "Dio," a story I read in a Knight collection back in 2018 under the title "The Dying Man."  So, two unearthly visions down, three to go--let's finish out the anthology by spending the day reading the included visions by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond Z. Gallun, and Clifford D. Simak.

Fellow SF fan "Petie," we salute you.

"Conditionally Human" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1952/1980)

Already my plan to read from my paperback copy of 5 Unearthly Visions is going off the rails.  isfdb indicates that the version of "Conditionally Human" in Conklin's 1965 anthology is substantially different from versions in other volumes, including Everett Bleiler and T. E. Dikty's Year's Best Science Fiction Novels: 1953, which purports to print texts speciallh revised by the authors.  I can't find a scan of the Bleiler and Dikty book, so I am going to read the version of "Conditionally Human" in an internet archive scan of 1980's The Best of Walter Miller, Jr., which I can see from the first line deviates from the text of the 1965 Conklin version.

It is the 2060s, the socialistic future in which the government gives you a test and tells you what job you get.  Our hero, Terry Norris, has been assigned a job his new wife Anne finds abhorrent, a job which he describes as being that of an "up-to-date dog catcher."  You see, the government, because of overpopulation concerns, also gives you a test to see if you are worthy of reproducing, and only the most impressive specimens are permitted to have a biological child.  Some of those denied parenthood by the government are permitted to own a genetically engineered artificial life form in a ploy to satisfy their desire to be parents, to experience a simulacrum of the love shared between parents and children.  For example, there are cat-things and dog-things that have the intelligence of a human baby and can understand and speak simple words of baby-talk English.

The most advanced of these artificial creatures are the "neutroids;" as their name suggests, these are sexless beings that look almost like a real human child.  A neutroids' physical development ceases before it reaches what in a sexed being would be puberty; depending on what model you can afford and have a license for, your neutroid might top out at three or five or whatever, with the limit at about ten years of age.  (As for intelligence, the neutroids are what I as a kid would have called "retarded" but now call "developmentally disabled.")  Couples who do well enough on the tests to merit neutroid ownership get special treatment--government doctors shoot the female member of the couple up with drugs to give her some of the experience of being pregnant, like odd cravings, weight gain, and lactation.  One of the story's little jokes is that before a couple receives delivery of their neutroid the wife goes to a hospital and the husband is expected to pretend to be nervous, to smoke cigarettes and pace back and forth in the maternity ward waiting room.  

Norris's job is to manage all these artificial creatures that inhabit his 200-mile-square sector of suburban housing; his most onerous duty is catching and destroying any of the artificial creatures that prove defective or somehow become ownerless.  Because the neutroids have something like an immature human's intelligence and personality, and, except for a little tail and lack of gonads, look kinda like human children, Anne thinks of her new husband, who has to toss neutroids into the handy gas chamber (complete with attached crematorium) in his back yard, not as a dog catcher but a baby-killer!

The various interwoven plot threads of "Conditionally Human" demonstrate the terrible psychological and sociological costs of the severe government limitations on childbirth and pubic policies that aim to fulfill women's maternal desires via Frankensteinian means.  A batch of neutroids is suspected of being defective, and Norris has to wrest them from the arms of their loving "parents," and some put up a fight.  Anne decides she wants to have a real child with Norris even though they are just class C, and doing so would risk separation and demotion to laborer status.  When Anne becomes acquainted with one of the defective neurtroids--its "defect" is that it is almost a normal human girl, with intelligence within typical human parameters and a body with gonads that will go through puberty and be able to bear children--she becomes attached to it and determined to make sure it is not destroyed.  (This story probably deserves a feminist analysis--women are its moral core, but they pursue traditional goals like wanting to care for and give birth to children.)

One theme Miller addresses is complicity.  In one subplot, Norris goes along with a corrupt superior's rule-breaking, and when this misbehavior leads to a broken-hearted woman committing murder, Norris recognizes that he is partly to blame for the carnage and regrets going against the rules.  But Norris also recognizes that he bears guilt for following the rules of the immoral government of which he is an agent.  In the climax of the story Norris tries to sabotage the system, taking a risky first step that he hopes will set off a chain of events that will result in the end of the government's intrusive and oppressive reproductive policies.

Religion is another of Miller's themes, as it often is in his work, and a clergyman plays a role in the story in the end, and in the closing pages of the story Anne reads from the Bible.

Miller is a good writer, and tackles serious, compelling topics in "Conditionally Human," as he did in other stories of his I liked, like "Crucifixius Etiam," "Death of a Spaceman," "I Made You" and "No Moon for Me."  Miller's work feels mature in part because it is ambiguous, it doesn't offer easy answers and doesn't feel like propaganda.  "Crucifixius Etiam" and "Death of a Spaceman" tell you that conquering space is a worthwhile goal, but fully admit it is going to entail horrendous sacrifice.  "Conditionally Human" portrays the government's population control measures as bad, but in Miller's story the population problem is real, not an illusion pushed by goofball activists or exploited as an excuse by government tyrants in their pursuit of greater power.  

Thumbs up, then for "Conditionally Human," another success from a consistently good writer.  I do have some criticisms of the story's structure and length, though.  It does feel a little long, and the climax at the end, when Norris decides to rebel and murders a fellow government employee, is less shocking and less climactic than the murder in the middle of the story.  I have to wonder if maybe the other versions of the story, in Galaxy and/or in 5 Unearthly Visions, might be tighter.

"Stamped Caution" by Raymond Z. Gallun (1953)

The Swedish translation of 5 Unearthly Visions, Spionen utifran, contains only the three stories "Legwork," "Stamped Caution" and "Shadow World."

"Shadow World" by Clifford D. Simak (1957)