In the Beginning Read Online Free PDF

do that?” the Minister murmured.
    “It was easy. He took a small coin out of his pocket and dropped it on the sidewalk. Two hundred people stopped and looked around at the sound.”
    The Minister smiled. Kalainnen knew from experience that he was a busy man, but at the moment he had the upper hand and he wanted to make the most of it.
    “The moral of the story is, sir, that some planets are good for one thing and some for another. And so if you’ll give us the tools we need, we’ll show you why ferocious monsters on Terra are pleasant pets on Trask. Fair enough?”
    “Fair enough,” said the Minister. He extended his pen to Kalainnen, who signed the agreement with a flourish.
    On his way out of the Ministry he passed Frandel, who was standing gloomily in the midst of a seemingly endless line.
    “Let’s get together again some time,” Kalainnen said, pausing for a moment. The Quangen just glared at him angrily. “Let me know when you get back to our system, old man. Perhaps you’d like to come over to Trask and study our technology.” Kalainnen smiled. “Best of luck, friend. The Minister is a fine man; you’ll see that as soon as you get to see him. If you get to see him, that is.”
    And Kalainnen walked on, feeling very pleased, and—unintentionally, of course—treading on the tip of this Quangen’s prehensile tail, which he had wanted to do all his life.

Long Live the Kejwa
    (1956)
    A great deal happened to me, professionally, between the publication of “Yokel With Portfolio” in the autumn of 1955 and the appearance of this one seven months later. The most important development was the arrival in New York City, where I was living then, of one Randall Garrett.
    Garrett, a charming, roguish fellow seven or eight years older than I was, came from Texas but had been living in the Midwest, working as a chemist and writing science fiction on the side, in the early 1950s. He was a natural storyteller and had a good grasp both of science and of the traditions of science fiction, and very quickly he sold a dozen stories or so to most of the major markets, including two excellent novelets (“The Waiting Game,” 1951, and “The Hunting Lodge,” 1954) to John W. Campbell’s Astounding, one of the leading magazines of the field. But like too many science-fiction writers Garrett had an unfortunate weakness for the bottle, which led early in 1955 to the end of his marriage and the loss of his job; and then the friends in Illinois with whom he had taken refuge wearied of his wayward ways and suggested he move along. That spring he packed up his few possessions and a box of unfinished manuscripts and headed for New York to establish himself as a full-time science-fiction writer.
    One of the few people he knew in New York was Harlan Ellison, who had come from the Midwest a year before Garrett with the same goal in mind. Harlan and I were close friends, and at my suggestion he had taken a room next door to me in the seedy Manhattan residence hotel where I was living during my college years, on West 114th Street, a couple of blocks from the Columbia campus. It was a place inhabited by a sprinkling of undergraduates, an assortment of aging graduate students, a few aspiring writers like Harlan and me, some very aged ladies living on pensions, and an odd collection of down-on-their-luck characters of no apparent profession. When he reached New York, Garrett phoned Ellison, who was still meeting only frustration in his attempts to break into print. Harlan told him about our hotel, and very suddenly we had him living down the hall from us. Almost immediately thereafter Garrett and I went into partnership as a sort of fiction factory.
    He and I could scarcely have been more different in temperament. Randall was lazy, undisciplined, untidy, untrustworthy, and alcoholic. I was a ferociously hard worker, ambitious, orderly, boringly respectable and dignified, and, though I did (and do) have a fondness for the occasional