In a blasted America where the cities are dangerous, improvised, and half-dead, Sam Dunlap arrives in New York with Arthur, a suitcase-sized brain kept alive in a tank and fitted with typewriter keys for a voice. To protect Arthur and his mysterious cargo, Sam bribes his way into a hotel, then heads into a fortified, lawless former Macy's to buy an electric typewriter, a wheelbarrow, a rifle, and other essentials, discovering a city where canned food rots, skeletons sit forgotten in stalle...

At a vast underwater oil operation, manager Muhlenhoff is jolted when a sudden breach in the deep-sea drilling chamber triggers pressure-driven corrosion that could destroy the entire project. As the board panics, he imposes discipline, gathers a specialized task force, and insists on calm, methodical action instead of retreat, revealing a crisis that tests both engineering and leadership. In his private office, he reflects on how far he has risen from hands-on technical work to corporate ...

Bored with his own era, the narrator uses a historical index to leap into a past he imagines will be full of danger, secrecy, and excitement. What he finds instead is a grimy, slang-charged city where every wrong word can turn deadly, and his earnest search for the Mafia lands him amid the rival gangs called the Leopards and the Boomer Dukes. His grand romantic notions collapse into chaos when he is beaten unconscious, wakes as rookie patrolman Walter Hutner, and begins to suspect that the...

In a nameless riverside bar, drunken space veteran Byron drifts through guilt, memory, and a dread he cannot quite name. A woman's nervous cough jolts him into recalling Gilvey and the other men who shared his one-way voyage to Mars, and the encounter quickly turns into a descent into the trauma he has spent years trying to drown. Byron reveals that the crew was chemically prevented from killing one another during the trip, but the restraint lasted only two years. Now back on Earth, he is ...

Herrell McCray, a deep-space navigator on a routine voyage near Betelgeuse, is ripped without warning from his ship and dropped into a dark, hostile maze where nothing seems physically possible. He wakes disoriented, unable even to see his own body, surrounded by a baffling mix of human relics, alien machinery, and shifting walls, and soon realizes he may be trapped far outside normal space and time. As McCray fights to survive heat, fumes, and confusion with only a spacesuit and space-ax,...

On a storm-lashed Jersey shore, Howard Mooney is broke, bored, and hungry for anything that might change his luck. Then a drenched stranger in a silvery outfit appears at his door with a briefcase full of sealed metal spheres, a demand for help, and the unsettling suggestion that time itself can be navigated like a map. The stranger, Harse, is no ordinary traveler but something far stranger: a refugee from the future carrying a "survival kit" packed with impossible technology and dangerous...

In the rigid prison-world of the Jug, Captain Liam O'Leary believes order, rehabilitation, and class duty can hold society together—until he meets Sue-Ann Bradley, a detainee who refuses to accept the role assigned to her. Her case, tied to the forbidden crime of violating the Categoried Class laws, exposes a civilization built on genetic specialization, inherited status, and the dangerous idea that people must never mix across boundaries. O'Leary's confidence begins to crack as he sees th...

A condemned man begins his confession on the eve of execution, admitting that he killed Laurence Connaught—the old friend who once saved his life. As he retraces their reunion in Washington, a Senate guard's routine existence is shattered by a violent foreign-relations debate, a grenade attack, and Connaught's impossible survival, which convinces the narrator that his friend has discovered something beyond ordinary human limits. Pressed for the truth, Connaught reveals a startling secret: ...

In the radioactive ruins after the Three-Hour War, Dr. Salva Gordy lives amid grief, isolation, and a world that seems to have lost all meaning. A once-promising scientist dismissed by a desperate government, he is still pursued for the invention he guards in secret, even as strange new life begins to stir in the wasteland around him. That fragile solitude is shattered by John de Terry, a biology-trained survivor who recognizes that the local ants are changing in extraordinary ways. Togeth...

Chandler is on trial for rape and murder in a world where such acts have become commonplace due to spontaneous, unexplained demonic "possessions." His trial is deemed necessary, as the location where his acts were carried out was assumed to be immune to such possessions. Chandler's trial ends with his exile and his being branded on the forehead. His experiences after the trial take him far from his home and put him on the trail of the source of these mysterious possessions.First se...

On a rocket bound for Callisto, Peter Duane is thrown into a violent clash over a mysterious cargo, a disputed payment, and a deadly reversal of course that leaves him unconscious and amnesiac. He wakes in the ship's sick bay accused of murdering Stevens, then is seized by Governor Andrias, a ruthless power on Callisto who can halt a rocket and command armed police without challenge. As Duane is dragged into a fortress-like prison and forced to confront fragments of memory, he begins to su...

This selection of Frederik Pohl's science fiction short stories covers topics ranging from out-of-body experiences, to alien visits, to the psychological effects of space travel, and more. The stories were published between 1942 and 1962, with some of them set in what feels like the same era in which they were written. Pohl's work is very human-centered, often with only minimal futuristic or speculative elements.Pohl used pseudonyms for some of these short stories, including James ...