"Time, ah, Heals Itself"

HERE'S A FRESH TAKE on a very old science fiction cliché. Eventually the time will come when we must say . . .

"Goodbye, Howard Henning."
By John E. Stith (born 1947).

Illustration by Jacey (Jason Cook; HERE).
Short short short story (2 pages).
Online at Nature/Futures (HERE; PDF).

     "The gun barrel swung slowly until it was directed at Harold."

Bureaucracy rules—and the first rule of bureaucracy is to cover up your mistakes any way 
you can . . .

Characters:
~ Harold Henning:
  "That can't be right."
~ The visitor:
  "I really hate Form 18083."

Resources:
- John Edward Stith, who seems to delight in crossing crime fiction with SFF (sometimes satirically), has won quite a few Major Awards in his time; see Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), the ISFDb (HERE), and his website (HERE).

- Another story with a time travel premise, this one highlighting different character motivations, is Edward McDermott's "The Snatchers" (HERE) from last November.

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"Certain Facts Have Come to Light That Make Us Think It Is Just Possible That He Was Murdered"

"Twice-Killed Corpse."
By Fredric Brown (1906-72).

First appearance: Ten Detective Aces, March 1942.

Short story (11 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go down to text page 31).

     "There was a big butcher knife sticking out of the middle of his chest."

It's well known that you can't libel the dead, but what about killing them—again?

Principal characters:
~ Mr. Murgatroyd:
  "There were lines of pain in his face that showed his last illness hadn't been a nice easy one."
~ Roy Williams:
  "I was startled at the thought that I was going to have a chance to meet and talk to a real detective. You see, I want to be one when I get old enough . . ."
~ John Rogers:
  ". . . if you can do what he asks, I might say that our appreciation will—uh—take tangible form."
~ Armin Malone:
  "The guy standing there when I opened the door didn't look like a detective at all."
~ Pete:
  "This guy ain't got all his buttons."
~ Mr. Bennett:
  ". . . came in and fired me first and then I had to tell it all to him, and he fired me again."
~ The coroner:
  "Well, I finally got around to trying Frohde's reagent. Ammonium molybdate dissolved in strong sulphuric acid. It turned blue, and then green, yellow, and 
finally—"
~ Captain Brady:
  "To hell with what his death was not. What was it?"
~ Harvey Cummings:
  ". . . the odor of alcohol came ahead of him into the room like an advance guard."
~ The lawyer:
  "He drew up a new will two days ago. But there weren't many important changes."

Call it "the moment," when sleuths in mystery fiction suddenly figure it all out:
   "And then, just like that, I knew why. I stood there gawping, and thinking I must be wrong because it was so simple, once you saw it."

Comment: Brown makes good use of the naive narrator technique.

References and resources:
- "we'd be in dutch": "The idioms go Dutch (related to Dutch treat) and in Dutch (which uses Dutch to mean 'trouble') are both sometimes perceived as insulting to or by the Dutch. In addition, the adjective Dutch is found in a few other set phrases (Dutch courage, Dutch gold, and Dutch uncle) in which it implies that something Dutch is not authentic. Although insulting a particular person or nationality may be unin-tentional, it is best to be aware that use of these terms is sometimes perceived as offensive to or by the Dutch." (Dictionary.com HERE).
- "If it should be a mare's nest": "something imagined to be an extraordinary discovery but proving to be a delusion or a hoax; an extremely confused, entangled, or disor-dered place, situation, etc." (Dictionary.com HERE).
- "we'd be holding the bag": In some variant expressions, "the bag" is "the baby": "Aban-
don someone, force someone to bear the responsibility or blame. For example, 'Her friends said they were too busy to help with cleaning up, and left Lucy holding the bag.' This expression is often put as be left holding the bag, as in 'When they quit the clean-up committee, Lucy was left holding the bag.' This idiom grew out of the earlier give one the bag (to hold), which dates from about 1600 and alludes to being left with an empty bag while others have taken the valuable contents." (The Free Dictionary HERE).
- Our latest case of insurance fraud was Donald Barr Chidsey's "The Murderer's Left Hand" (HERE).
- We just can't resist Fredric Brown's fiction; the last story by him that we featured here was "Four Blind Men" (HERE).

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"He Leveled a Very Effective-looking Blue-barreled Automatic at Me"

THE WILD ADVENTURES of Dr. Indiana Jones pretty much exploded the myth of the dull and prosaic life of the small university archaeology professor, and the same can be said of today's main character, a small university mathematician, as he's pushed to . . .

"The Brink of Infinity."

By Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902-35).
First appearance: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1936.

Reprinted in Startling Stories, March 1948 and Fantastic Story Magazine, Summer 1954, and collected and anthologized many times since (reprints page HERE).

Short short story (9 pages as a PDF).

Online at Fadedpage (HERE).
(Note: As the transcriber informs us, there's a misprint: The square root of minus 1 is "i", not "e.")

     "You're a mathematician, aren't you? Well, that makes you fair game for 
me. A mathematician, my good friend, is no more to me than something to 
be hunted down. And I'm doing it!"

Will he survive this? Don't count on it . . .

Main characters:
~ Dr. Abner Aarons, Statistician and Consulting Mathematician:
  "And what is the proposition, Mr. Strawn?"
~ Court Strawn, experimental chemist:
  "As a matter of fact, Dr. Aarons, the experiment isn't completed yet. Indeed, to tell the truth, it is just beginning."

Typo: "And student of numbers" [should be Any].

Resources and references:
- "The mathematician's symbol for infinity is a tipsy eight—so: ∞.": The concept of infinity (Wikipedia HERE and HERE) has spawned interesting, if highly unlikely, conjectures such as "the infinite monkey theorem" (Wikipedia HERE) and other paradoxical notions (Wikipedia HERE), most of them primarily of interest to mathematicians.
- "Clerk-Maxwell, Lobachewski": Our author namedrops mathematicians largely unknown to the general public, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79; Wikipedia HERE) and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792-1856; Wikipedia HERE).
- "the great Albert Einstein himself": Time was (but such may have passed now that Western culture is being dismantled) that when the public bothered to think of brainy scientists, they would almost certainly envision Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955), "a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed 'the world's most famous equation'." (Wikipedia HERE).
- We can only speculate, but it could be that our author was under the influence of what has been called "the most popular short story ever written in English" (1924; PDF text HERE) or the 1932 film adaptation of it; see Wikipedia (WARNING! SPOILERS! HERE). Of course, in today's story the pursuit is mental ("checking my scraps of information, thinking, trying to remember fragments") and not, as in the movie, purely physical.

- This was Stanley Grauman Weinbaum's final published story because he died of lung cancer at the early age of 33, his publishing career only lasting less than a year and a 
half; see Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), the IMDb (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE).

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"He Was Killed with a Blank Cartridge"

"Four Blind Men."
By Fredric Brown (1906-72).
Illustration by Earle Winslow (1884-1969; HERE).

First appearance: Adventure, September 1948.

Short short story (6 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
(Note: Faded text but readable.)

     "The three shots were within a space of ten seconds."

The sudden and violent death of a ringmaster at a circus doesn't seem to provoke much in the way of lamentation, since he was universally disliked ("The kind of guy," we're told, "any-
body might want to kill")—but, despite an abundance of clues, just how he departed this 
vale of tears isn't at all obvious . . .

Principal characters:
~ Sopronowicz:
  "Everybody under him hated his guts because he was an all-around louse."

~ Cap Gurney:
  "A clue is the most meaningless thing there is. Nine times out of ten it points the wrong way. It helps fill in a picture, though."
~ Jeff Kranich:
  "There's where the stiff is."
~ Ambers:
  "Don't tell me the law, son. I read Blackstone once when I was young. It didn't 
take . . ."
~ Carle:
  "Says Sopronowicz had a yellow streak a foot wide down his back, and that the 
only person on earth who couldn't possibly shoot Sopronowicz was Sopronowicz."
~ Golde:
  "The ringmaster had arguments with Golde over bookkeeping."
~ Standish:
  ". . . the trainer, a guy named Standish."
~ Walter Andrews:
  ". . . we've questioned the only three men we know to have been in the building and their stories sound O.K., except that they were far apart and none of 'em can alibi the others."
~ Fred:
  "The fact that it was an elephant wasn't the point of the story at all . . ."

References and resources:
- ". . . so naturally they call them Mutt and Jeff": At the time of our story, they were enormously popular comic strip/book characters. (Wikipedia HERE).

- "I read Blackstone once": William Blackstone (1723-80), highly influential when it comes to English common law jurisprudence. "He is most noted for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England." (Wikipedia HERE).
- "That story about the four blind men": "The parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has been widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it." (Wikipedia HERE).

- Our last visit with Fredric William Brown (note the first name spelling) involved another one of his mysteries, "The Ghost Breakers" (HERE).

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"It Would Have To Be Murder, Now, but It Couldn't Look Like Murder"

"Little Planet."
By Thorp McClusky (1906-75).

Illustration by Frank R. Paul (1884-1963; HERE).
First appearance: Science Fiction, October 1939.

Short short story (9 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "There was no possibility, now, that he would die a natural death before the landing on Earth."

If you're planning a perfect murder in deep space, don't forget how to drive . . .

Main characters:
~ Old Joel Rutledge:
  ". . . listened with the sharp-eared alertness of one who knows that death stalks 
close . . ."
~ Black Thom Arnold:
  "The ore he had already secured would make him—if all went well—one of  the 
wealthiest men in the system—"
~ Gregg Morrow and Noreen Rutledge:
  "In that moment of black despondency, they simultaneously heard the faint, 
distant drumming of a rocket motor in the black sky."

Comment: Evidently there's no space traffic control on Earth—risky, at best.
Further comment: If our story is to be believed, Portland will be in more competent 
hands in the future.

Resources:
- "His eyelids felt heavy as neutronium": ". . . a hypothetical substance composed 
purely of neutrons . . .  Science fiction and popular literature frequently use 
the term 'neutronium' to refer to a highly dense phase of matter composed 
primarily of neutrons." (Wikipedia HERE).

- Asteroid mining like what we see in our story would yield comparatively little profit; see the infographic below, which clearly implies that a larger operation would be called for; also see "Asteroid Mining" (HERE) and a paper on mining platinum from asteroids (HERE; PDF).

- While our author specialized in the weird tale (the ISFDb HERE), he also occasionally produced fiction aimed at juveniles.

- We've featured a few stories set in the Asteroid Belt, the latest one being H. L. Gold's "Grifters' Asteroid" (HERE).

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"You Think That I'll Do It So That You Can Prey on the Country with Ease, As an Invisible Criminal?"

"Dweller in the Darkness."
By Edmond Hamilton (1904-77).

Illustration by Charles Schneeman (1912-72; HERE).
First appearance: Science Fiction, October 1939.

Short short short story (4 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "I'll kill you! I'll kill you—"

Out of sight but not out of mind . . .

Principal characters:
~ Dr. Thomas Geary:
  "You all see this rabbit."
~ The rabbit:
  "For moments, it shone with wan green luminescence and then its outlines grew 
misty . . ."
~ Fred Kells:
  ". . . a beady-eyed, dark, tight-faced little man who looked oddly out of place . . ."

Resources:
- Unlike a lot of other SFF authors, to his credit Cummings homes in on the most glaring scientific fact that would invalidate Wells's Invisible Man (below)—but cleverly inserts 
his own applied phlebotinum anyway; see TV Tropes (HERE and HERE).
- "suppose light curved around it": "Depending on whether the science fiction is hard science fiction or soft science fiction, the depictions of invisibility may be more rooted in actual or plausible technologies (such as depictions of technologies to make a vessel not appear on detection equipment), or more on the fictional or speculative end of the spectrum." (Wikipedia HERE and HERE). Probably the most famous piece of fiction depicting invisibility is H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man (1897). (Wikipedia HERE and HERE.)

- We've already highlighted a few stories about criminals interacting with invisibility: Anthony Pelcher's "Invisible Death" (HERE), Charles E. Fritch's "See No Evil" (HERE), Ralph Milne Farley's "Black Light" (HERE), Charles R. Tanner's "The Vanishing Diamonds" (HERE), Charles B. Child's "Invisible Killer" (HERE), and Henry Slesar's "The Invisible Man Murder Case" (HERE).
- Previous stories by Edmond Hamilton featured on ONTOS: "Murder in the Void" (HERE) and "Murder Asteroid" (HERE).
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"The Explosion of the Shotgun Against the Night Came Clear and Loud"

"O'Sheen Goes to the Dogs."
By Leroy Yerxa (1915-46).

First appearance: Mammoth Detective, March 1943.

Short short story (5 pages).

Online at Roy Glashan's Library (HERE; HTML).

     "Run for it. I'll shoot you down before you take three steps."

It's been remarked that the potato famine in Ireland (HERE) put an Irish cop on every large American city's street corner; case in point: "Paddy" O'Sheen, a flatfoot who pays thought-
ful attention to details. Sherlock would be proud . . .

Main characters:
~ Richard Rand:
  ". . . loved his guns and his dog Pat above all else."
~ Pat:
  ". . . the English setter, was whining and scratching at the door."
~ Shad Waller:
  ". . . turned toward the outer door, hesitated and turned back again. 
His face was long and bewildered."
~ Officer "Paddy" O'Sheen:
  ". . . didn't like violent death. It made him sick and angry inside."

Resources:
- Today's story features one of Leroy Yerxa's very few series characters, "Paddy" O'Sheen the beat cop, in the second of his six adventures chronicled in Mammoth Detective (1943-44); the other series characters were "Arrow" Larson (two tales in Amazing Stories, 1942-43) and Freddie Funk (five stories in Fantastic Adventures, 1943-45, 1948). (FictionMags data.)
- Nearly all of the attention given to Leroy Arnold Yerxa these days involves his SFF: Notes (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE).
- Roy Glashan's substantial collection of Leroy Yerxa stories can be found (HERE).
- This is hardly our first encounter with Yerxa; see "Fingerprints of Fear" (HERE; may have been Yerxa, we're not sure), "These Shoes Are Killing Me" (HERE; definitely him), and "One-Way Ticket to Nowhere" (HERE; ditto).
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