One Was Stubbron

S
ELECTED
F
ICTION
W
ORKS
BY
L. R
ON
H
UBBARD

F
ANTASY

The Case of the Friendly Corpse

Death's Deputy

Fear

The Ghoul

The Indigestible Triton

Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep

Typewriter in the Sky

The Ultimate Adventure

S
CIENCE
F
ICTION

Battlefield Earth

The Conquest of Space

The End Is Not Yet

Final Blackout

The Kilkenny Cats

The Kingslayer

The Mission Earth Dekalogy*

Ole Doc Methuselah

To the Stars

A
DVENTURE

The Hell Job series

W
ESTERN

Buckskin Brigades

Empty Saddles

Guns of Mark Jardine

Hot Lead Payoff

A full list of L. Ron Hubbard's
novellas and short stories is provided at the back.

*Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes

Published by
Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028

© 2013 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.

Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.

Mission Earth
is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission.
Battlefield Earth
is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.

Horsemen illustration from
Western Story Magazine
is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Cover art; “One Was Stubborn” and “A Can of Vacuum” story illustrations; Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations and Glossary illustrations:
Unknown
and
Astounding Science Fiction
copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC. “240,000 Miles Straight Up” story illustrations and Story Preview cover art: © 1948 Standard Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Hachette Filipacchi Media.

ISBN 978-1-59212-601-9 EPUB version
ISBN 978-1-59212-777-1 Kindle version
ISBN 978-1-59212-370-4 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-244-8 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927676

Contents

F
OREWORD

O
NE
W
AS
S
TUBBORN

A C
AN OF
V
ACUUM

240,000 M
ILES
S
TRAIGHT
U
P

C
HAPTER
O
NE

C
HAPTER
T
WO

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

S
TORY
P
REVIEW

T
HE
G
REAT
S
ECRET

L. R
ON
H
UBBARD IN THE
G
OLDEN
A
GE OF
P
ULP
F
ICTION

T
HE
S
TORIES FROM THE
G
OLDEN
A
GE

G
LOSSARY

FOREWORD

Stories from
Pulp Fiction's
Golden Age

A
ND
it
was
a golden age.

The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.

“Pulp” magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than
Scheherazade
could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class “slick” magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the “rest of us,” adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to
read.
Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.

The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.

In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today's short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.

Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of
Argosy,
the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: “The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.”

Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L'Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.

In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in
Thrilling Adventures,
Argosy,
Five-Novels Monthly,
Detective Fiction Weekly,
Top-Notch,
Texas Ranger,
War Birds,
Western Stories,
even
Romantic Range.
He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from
G-men
and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.

Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for
Argosy,
called “Hell Job,” in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.

Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a
writer,
and that's the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.

This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard's fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.

Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from
Argosy
through
Zeppelin Stories
continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.

L. Ron Hubbard's Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.

Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a
great story.

—Kevin J. Anderson

KEVIN J. ANDERSON
is the author of more than ninety critically acclaimed works of speculative fiction, including The Saga of Seven Suns, the continuation of the Dune Chronicles with Brian Herbert, and his
New York Times
bestselling novelization of L. Ron Hubbard's
Ai! Pedrito!

One Was Stubborn

Author's Note

T
his present manuscript is a paraphrase of one which is very strange indeed. I have included in it all its essentials and have removed from it only that which was rambling and incoherent. The original came to me in the hands of a peculiar old fellow who was admitted for treatment to Balm Springs. He had a very stubborn quality about him which made him nearly impossible to treat, and this intractability earned for him the pseudonym of Old Shellback among the interns and psychiatrists.

Oddly, he came with no past history and refused to give any. No one could learn, for some time, where he had been born or whether he had any people alive. And then, one day, with a rock-jawed glare at my insistence, he said:

“My mother and father have yet to be born. If I have any ancestors living in this country now I am positive I won't see them. The place I was born will not be built for another three hundred years and, when I was born in it, it was already two hundred and fifty years old. It is gone because it has yet to exist. It will be gone thereafter because it will cease to exist.

“I am a negative five hundred and ninety years old. Tomorrow, my birthday, I shall be a negative five hundred and eighty-nine. I have less than thirty years of life expectancy remaining to me and so I shall not live to be more than a negative five hundred and sixty years.

“What has happened to me has happened because of what happened to the Universe. But mainly because there is but one god and his name will be George Smiley.

“You haven't tried to make me do anything. Therefore I shall give you the manuscript which explains this. I wrote it when I was marooned a little while, about eighty years from now, in Paris just after the United States began to rebuild it.”

And so he brought me the manuscript. It had evidently been written under stress, for the first half-dozen pages are illegible as compared to the graceful script of the remainder.

Old Shellback grew restless after he had been with us six or seven months, for he seemed to sense danger in all clocks. In fact a man had only to take out a watch and Old Shellback would dive for his cubicle and refuse to come forth the rest of the day. Then he began to mutter, over and over, “Not far enough back. Not far enough back. Not far enough back.” Nothing could be found as the cause of this, but Old Shellback seemed to think the menace quite valid. And then one day he came rushing into my office—it was a New Year's Day—and demanded his original manuscript which, of course, I gave him. I had no thought of what he might do and what he did was quite startling.

Old Shellback was seen to lock himself into his room. There was no egress therefrom.

An hour later, when he would not respond, we forced the door.

On the bed was a scrawled note:

“My apologies to Dr. LaFayette. But this is not far enough back, you see. Not far enough back!”

Old Shellback was gone!