3 New Short Pulp Stories added to The Fox Library

ADAM'S EVE

by Richard O. Lewis

Originally published in Amazing Stories, May 1943

Adam Harper left his own time-dimension to rescue the victim of an experiment. He did not succeed—but the reward was Eve!

Adam Harper didn't know when it was he had fallen in love with the shadow.

Perhaps it had been upon that first day when she had appeared out of no where in his lonely laboratory. Had it been a week ago? Two weeks?

Adam Harper didn't know. After all, when a man lives for three years alone in a laboratory and away from civilization with nothing more animate than a machine and a dog . . . well, he is likely to lose a certain amount of perspective; likely, even, to fall in love with a shadow.

Adam paused in his work at the table to look at her again, to marvel at her beauty. She was standing beside the huge machine watching him.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. "Beautiful and primitive."

His eyes traveled the symmetrical length of her. The slender roundness of her legs. The curve of her hips, covered only by what appeared to be a loin cloth. The bare torso. The full breasts. And the cascade of hair that framed her oval face and fell in folds about her shapely shoulders.

He wondered about the color of that hair. Would it be brown? Red? Yellow? Golden? And what about the lips and the round eyes?

But he had no way of knowing. She was but a shadow, and the far wall of the laboratory was dimly visible through her body.

Adam felt keenly his responsibility for the girl. It was due to his experiments with the time-dimension that she had been caught up out of her remote past and stranded somewhere between that past and the present.

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SEA-TIGER

By Henry S. Whitehead

Originally appeared in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, October 1932

She had succumbed in the direful struggle with the sea-beast.

Merman and Mermaid were they in the drowning Hewitt's revealing vision.

Arthur Hewitt's first intimation of the terrific storm which struck the Barbadian off Hatteras, en route for the West Indies, was a crash which awakened him out of uneasy sleep in the narrow berth of his cabin. When he staggered up to the saloon-deck the next morning after an extremely uncomfortable, sleepless night, he looked out of the ports upon a sea which transcended anything he had ever seen. The Barbadian, heeling and hanging, wallowed in the trough of cross seas which wrenched her lofty bridge-deck.

A steward, who was having a rather difficult time keeping his feet, fetched him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. In a little while two other passengers appeared for breakfast: one a British salesman, and the other an American ship's officer, out of a professional berth and going to Antigua to help take off a sugar crop. The three men, warmed now by the coffee and the comfortable security of the lounge, snored and chattered intimately.

Nevertheless, a sinister foreboding seemed to hang over them. At last Matthews, the American, voiced it plainly:

"I hope she'll make St. Thomas! Well—I've always heard that Captain Baird knows his business; a good sailorman, they say."

"Do you think there'll be any let-up when we get into the Gulf Stream?" This was the Englishman, breaking a long, dreary silence.

"More likely a let-down, I'd say," replied the pessimistic Matthews. "She'll be worse, if anything, in my judgment."

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BLACK LOTUS

by Robert Bloch

The tale of a Dreamer whose dreams merged with grim reality.

Originally from Fantasy Book, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1047

This is the story of Genghir the dreamer, and of the curious fate that overtook him in his dreams; a story old men whisper in the souks of ispahan as other old men once whispered it in fabled teraz, five thousand years ago. What portion of it is truth and what portion only fantasy, I leave unto your judgment. There are strange sayings in the banned books, and Alhazred had reasons for his madness; but as I have said, the judgment rests with you. I but relate the tale.

Know then that Genghir was lord over a distant kingdom in the days of the griffin and the fleet-winged unicorn. Rich and powerful was his domain, and peaceful and well-ruled withal, so that its sovereign need occupy himself only with his pleasures.

Handsome was Genghir, but formed as a woman is formed, so that he cared not for the chase or manly combat. His days were spent in rest and study, and his nights in revelry amongst the women. The functions of government rested upon the shoulders of Hassim el Wadir, the Vizier, whilst the true sultan dallied at his pleasures.

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