The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Worlds of If, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

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Title: The Worlds of If

Author: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

Release Date: October 5, 2007 [EBook #22890]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _A Martian Odyssey and Others_
published in 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor
spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
The square root symbol has been transcribed as [sq].

THE WORLDS OF IF

I stopped on the way to the Staten Island Airport to call up, and that
was a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise.
But the office was affable. "We'll hold the ship five minutes for you,"
the clerk said. "That's the best we can do."

So I rushed back to my taxi and we spun off to the third level and sped
across the Staten bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow. I had to
be in Moscow by evening, by eight o'clock, in fact, for the opening of
bids on the Ural Tunnel. The Government required the personal presence
of an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known better than
to send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells Corporation is, so
to speak, my father. I have a--well, an undeserved reputation for being
late to everything; something always comes up to prevent me from getting
anywhere on time. It's never my fault; this time it was a chance
encounter with my old physics professor, old Haskel van Manderpootz. I
couldn't very well just say hello and good-bye to him; I'd been a
favorite of his back in the college days of 2014.

I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when
I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket _Baikal_ hummed
over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame.

We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew
up to Moscow, but it