The first lines that grab you by the collar, drawn from thousands of vintage SF stories. Read one you like; the whole story is free.
Chester McRae. Good old Chet, best man in Accounting.
I stepped back out of the gutter and watched the tight clot of men disappear around the corner.
Andy Larson was a hard-headed Swede. He had to be, to be still alive.
The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god--but far from sacred!
His head hurt like blazes, but he was alive, and to be alive meant fighting like hell to stay that way.
I was late, or I would have gone back and ditched the rubbers; I hate the foolish things to begin with, one reason I moved to the country--out there, I wear house slippers half the year, galoshes the rest; there's no in-between.
"Choose!" said the robonurse. "Choose!" echoed his entire world.
They tried to kill Alan Rackham about an hour after he had seen the accident. They bungled the job.
You don't want death and you don't expect death. Something goes wrong, your rocket tilts in space, a planetoid jumps up, blackness, movement, hands over the eyes, a violent pulling back of available power in the fore-jets, the crash....
She awoke, and didn't even wonder where she was.
The thing is over now, but I can't see a Teddy bear or a set of blocks in a department store window without shuddering.
JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening.
The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup."
When you looked outside, it was into darkness.
The door-knob turned, then rattled.
Very trivial things can go into the weaving of a nest. The human race, for instance--
Sober or drunk, Johnny was seeing things. Like spider webs in the night sky.
The first terrestrial expedition to Mars didn't find any Martians. Neither did the second.
You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draft of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day.
It's the not knowing that gets you. The wondering.
Suddenly the biggest thing in the universe was the very tiniest.
The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who was to tell she had some rather startling interests?
Murdering Stein was easy. Kraag waited until Jonner donned his spacesuit and went out to have a personal look at the asteroid.
The knock at the door came in the middle of the night, as Josip Pekic had always thought it would.
How do you get rid of a superman?
Eddie Amhurst watched the scissors get up from the dresser and march across the room. If they had marched on the floor it would have been bad enough--but not this bad.
"What color's the sky?"
"I have a formula," the little man said loudly.
It was Orley Mattup's killing of the old lab technician that really made us hate him.
Since evils cancel out, avoid odd numbers of them ... even if you have to get an odder one!