Everett B Cole's "Millennium" (novella, free): Serf to feudal lord to dead!

There is a very old Sanskrit story from "Panchtantra" (~200 BC) that was part of my primary school curriculum: A jackal accidentally fell in a drum of blue dye. He noticed his color change in his image in the river & promptly declared him the new king of the jungle. Until the rains washed off his new color...

This story has a similar idea. A serf gets opportunity to kill his feudal lord during a hunt. He kills him & appropriates two powerful gadgets the lord had: one gives the wearer telepathic power; second makes the wearer invulnerable to any kind of attack. Things happen, & in time, by cleverly using these devices, he rises to be a feudal lord himself. A very cruel one.

Only the gadgets belong to a space faring society & were lost on this world during an accident on one of their visits. Now they're back to recover the gadgets. So they'll end the rein of the cruel lord as they recover their gadgets.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, May 1955.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Everett B Cole.

"Astounding Science Fiction", October 1955 (British Edition) (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package.
Caution: Cover advertises a story - Charles F Hockett's "How to Learn Martian" - but it's not listed in ToC! It is, however, included in the internal pages.

"Allamagoosa" is among the best of science fiction. I'm sure I've seen "Risk" somewhere, but cannot quite place it.

Table of contents. 

Links on author fetch more fiction by author. Where I'm aware of other online copies of a story, I include them too.

1. [novelette] Everett B Cole's "Millennium": "There are devices a high-level culture could produce that simply don't belong in the hands of incompetents of lower cultural evolution. The finest, & most civilized of tools can be made a menace..."
2. [novelette] Isaac Asimov's "Risk": It was guaranteed not to kill anybody--wouldn't harm a hair of your head. Of course, it did tend to turn you into a mindless idiot--but it wouldn't hurt you a bit."
3. [ss] Eric Frank Russell's "Allamagoosa" (A); download: 'Just what it was, they weren't quite sure, but they knew it had to be there; the Bureau's Inventory said so. And the consequences of its "accidental" destruction were astonishing...'
4. [serial - 2/4] Poul Anderson's "The Long Way Home": "They weren't exactly welcome on Earth 5,000 years beyond their time--but they were hotly contended for. Nobody liked them, but everybody wanted them--particularly the one who wasn't there!"
5. Charles F Hockett's "How to Learn Martian": "Once upon a time, people thought that a vocabulary & the grammar rules were the whole story on learning a language. But modern linguistics finds it's both more complicated, & also somewhat simpler than that..."

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
4. Fiction from 1950s.

Everett B Cole's "Indirection" (short story, first contact, free): A method to keep state secrets

While there are any number of stories that tell the story of a fiction author, or movies that tell about movie makers, this is by far the most engaging I've seen of the kind: science fiction authors as agents enrolled to keep state secrets!

Story summary.

Super-advanced galactic races have had their observers forever on earth, their memories now preserved in legends. To make things more interesting, humans were among the advanced races that somehow faced a long forgotten doomsday, & fell to primitive times; but they do retain something from this ancient glory.

Now one of these alien observers, masquerading as a human scholar in a remote rural community, has his cover exposed due to a naughty native servant. So what should the aliens do to ensure humanity is prepared for an eventual contact with them...

See also.

1. Arthur Clarke & James Blish's "Guardian Angel": Another story where humanity needs a long time preparing for contact with aliens, known so far via legends. Specifics, however, are very different.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, January 1956.
Download full text as part of Astounding issue it appeared in.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: First contact fiction; Fiction from 1950s.

"Astounding Science Fiction", January 1956 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Available online at Internet Archive in multiple formats.
Note: I'd posted this link, sans ToC, sometime back. Regulars might already have it on their disk.

Has a lot of pages missing, among them at least two of the stories - "The Executioner" & "Won't You Walk-". Means the only complete story is "Indirection".

Table of contents (4 stories).

Links on author fetch more matching fiction.

1. [novelette] Algis Budrys' "The Executioner": Not available in online copy linked above.
   
   Not read.
2. [novelette] Theodore Sturgeon's "Won't You Walk-": Not available in online copy linked above.
   
   Not read.
3. [ss] Everett B Cole's "Indirection" (B): "The best way to keep a secret is to publish it in a quite unbelievable form—and insist that it is the truth."
4. [serial - conclusion (probably part 3/3] Frank Herbert's "Under Pressure": "There was a factor present that held the men together under that grinding, unendurable pressure ... that wouldn't fit into the psychodynamic equations. Essentially, they weren't machines, and the dynamics of machines didn't apply!"
   
   Not read.

See also.

1. Fiction from Analog/Astounding (only issues edited by Harry Bates, John Campbell).
2. Stories written by John Campbell.
3. Fiction from 1950s.
   
4. Old "pulp" magazines.