THE NOTEBOOKS OF MACK SIKES by Larry Niven

"No conflict, no story,' says my friend and Sarge. They he yells across the room, "Hey, Larry! See that six-foot-tall white rabbit over there?"

"Yeah?"

"Curtain!"

A rare publishing event has brought this old party routine suddenly to mind.

Harvey McIlroy Sikes turned to science fiction in the 1930s. His work, spanning three decades, in noted more for the quantity than for quality; but the pulp magazines were always hungry for material. Now, at last, Mack Sikes' estate has permitted us to publish these excerpts from his notebooks. Sikes' fans may derive some enjoyment from these dozen-odd plot summations of stories that Sikes somehow never got around to writing.

CLAN

YOU, ROBOT

BLANKENSTEIN

BRAVE NEW WHIRL

1985

MARINA

NIGHTFALLING

THE COLD MATHEMATICS

TAU TEENY

THE LEFT HAND OF BENNY

GRALLDEN

THE ROADS MUST STROLL

TOURIST IN A STRANGE LAND

BUG NORMAN SPINRAD

MISSTEP OF GRAVITY

Mekzlin: a massive world with a tremendous rotation rate- - -once in twenty-one minutes- - -and a surface gravity that varies from 3G at the distended equator, to 800G at the poles. An exploring ship makes the tragic mistake of landing at the pole. Ships's robots must somehow scrape the remains of the crew out of the circuitry before the ship sags into a disk.