Henry Beam Piper’s book “Five Sci-Fi Short Stories“ is a collection of: The Answer, Temple Trouble, Flight From Tomorrow, Police Operation and Graveyard of Dreams. “The Answer” is about two nuclear scientists who have successfully made a very powerful weapon and are planning to drop it from space on un-expecting earthlings. The story is set in 1984, many years after a supposed nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union had ended. The stories "Temple Trouble" and "Police Operation" deal ...

A galactic war has left the Terran Federation in ruins. Formerly civilized planets have decivilized into barbarism. Space Vikings roam the wreckage, plundering and killing for gain. Lord Lucas Trask of Traskon was no admirer of the Space Vikings, but when murder takes his wife on his wedding day, Trask trades everything he has for his own Space Viking ship and sets out on a galaxy-wide quest for revenge.

The Lane Fleming collection of early pistols and revolvers was one of the best in the country. When Fleming was found dead on the floor of his locked gunroom, a Confederate-made Colt-type percussion .36 revolver in his hand, the coroner’s verdict was “death by accident.” But Gladys Fleming had her doubts. Enough at any rate to engage Colonel Jefferson Davis Rand—better known just as Jeff—private detective and a pistol-collector himself, to catalogue, appraise, and negotiate the sale of her l ...