Five Stories About Saying To Hell With Rules and Regulations

[First published in Astounding Magazine; collected in The Edge of Tomorrow, among others.] Historian Arnold Potterley is convinced that Cathage’s reputation for child sacrifice is the product of Roman propaganda. Access to a time-viewing chronoscope would allow Potterley to resolve the matter one way or another. To Potterley’s intense frustration, he cannot convince the relevant authorities to grant him access to any government chronoscope.

No choice, therefore, but to join forces with physicist Jonas Foster in a bid to build a private chronoscope. In short order, they discover that the government has withheld certain important facts about chronoscopes, including the ease with which private chronoscopes can be built. A golden age of time-viewing is upon humanity…whether that’s a good thing or not.

Counterintuitively, the government actually had a good reason to want to restrict access to chronoscopes. At least they managed to delay the uncomfortable adjustment period that will inevitably follow cheap, portable time-viewers.

Arms manufacturer Baines presents Theron Ware with a simple task: use black magic to kill two men, including the current governor of California. This is but a test: Baines has a considerably more ambitious project in mind and wishes to see if Ware’s skills are up to the task.

Baines’ bold proposal is to summon all Hell’s demons to Earth for one single memorable night. The results will surely be highly informative! And if the hosts of Hell prove too disruptive, surely it will be as easy to dismiss them as it was to call them up. Right?

The bad news is that some unforeseen implementation issues are encountered during the latter part of the project. The good news—although not the Good News, biblically speaking—is that the ending provided Blish with sufficient scope for a sequel.

Psychology graduate student Grottwold is certain his marvelous device did not disintegrate laboratory assistant Angie. Grottwold assures Angie’s fiancé Jim that Angie has simply been teleported to another universe. Furthermore, Grottwold believes he knows how to retrieve Angie. Probably.

Step one: more judiciously using the same machine that (probably) didn’t disintegrate Angie, Grottwold will dispatch Jim’s mind to the wherever it was that Angie went. Once he locates Angie, all Jim need do is induce the proper state of mind to trigger Angie’s return to Minnesota. This sounds straightforward, but it fails to take into account certain unforeseen complications, such as Jim finding himself trapped in the body of a dragon.

The plot is driven in part by Jim and Angie’s struggle to find affordable accommodation, a problem that is definitively resolved by the end of the novel. The problem is two-fold: Minnesota rents are high¹ and Jim and Angie’s wages are low. Presumably someone has addressed the housing issue in the decades since the novel was written.

The Dominator, a vastly powerful, malevolent sorcerer, has been defeated. The Dominator cannot be killed. He can and has been sealed away in a silver spike hammered into the side of a divine tree. As long as nothing happens to the spike, the world is safe².

Leaving a perfectly good silver spike imbued with pure evil stuck in the side of a god-tree is basically begging some visionary entrepreneur to retrieve and sell the spike. Just ask Old Man Fish, Tully, Smeds, and Timmy, who waste no time before launching what will be the boldest heist of their careers. Or at least the final one.

Readers might wonder if it would have been more prudent to place the Dominator in something more commonplace than a silver spike—a simple ring, say. However, the silver spike incident is the second time someone fiddled with bonds sealing the Dominator away. I would not be surprised if among the Dominator’s preparations was an ongoing spell compelling the weak-minded to free him.

Marcie’s cunning plan to ensure Anika and Max’s inevitable romance by inveigling Anika and Max to join Marcie, Lauren, and Sean on a road trip had but one small flaw. The romance is entirely evitable. Anika and Max feel no sparks.

A welcome diversion from an increasingly tense road trip appears in the form of a sign that reads “Private Property. No Trespassing. Violators! You Will Be Shot! Survivors Will Be Shot Again!” No reason to post such a warning if there weren’t something extremely cool on the other side of it. The quintet are determined to find out what that extremely cool something is.

To be fair to the other teens, it’s not so much that the quintet is intrigued by the sign. Marcie is. Marcie has many obvious flaws but unfortunately for her friends, she has one notable strength: she can be sufficiently persuasive that four otherwise sensible kids will follow her past that sign.