Orbit (anthology Series) - Orbit 5

Orbit 5

Volume 5 was published September 1969 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. It was Reprinted October 1969 by Putnam, December 1969 by Berkley Medallion, and November 1970 by Rapp & Whiting. It was edited by Damon Knight

Table of contents:

• "Somerset Dreams", short story by Kate Wilhelm
• "The Roads, The Roads, The Beautiful Roads", short story by Avram Davidson, written in 1969, reprinted in the anthology Car Sinister The head of a state highway department, whose highest passion in life is designing highways even if they are not needed, is driving on one of the highways he built. He takes the wrong exit and ends up in a closed off tunnel where a highway minotaur attacks him.

From the story, "The roads, the roads were engineered beautifully. It was the stupid bastard "people" who were engineered wrong."

• "Look, You Think you've Got Troubles", short story by Carol Carr, about a non-religious Jewish family whose daughter marries an alien who subsequently converts to Judaism.
• "Winter's King", short story by Ursula K. Le Guin
• "The Time Machine=", short story by Langdon Jones, with a prisoner reminiscing about an affair he had with a married women.
• "Configuration of the North Shore", short story by R.A. Lafferty about a psychiatrist exploring a patient's extraordinary dream that could lead to the ultimate fulfillment of human existence.
• "Paul's Treehouse", short story by Gene Wolfe
• "The Price", short story by Belcher C. Davis, reprinted as "Just Dead Enough". A local newspaper reporter follows a case where a man dies in a car accident and his organs are transplanted into other people in the town. The case becomes interesting when one of the organ recipients kills someone in a car accident and doesn't have insurance. The lawyer tries to make the argument that the organ recipient is the heir of the donor. Then the heirs sue the hospital for getting them involved in the case to begin with.
• "The Rose Bowl-Pluto hypothesis", short story by Robert S. Richardson written under the pen name Philip Latham. A professor notices that racing scores have dramatically improved and proposes that it is due to space shrinking.
• "Winston", short story by Kit Reed, written in 1969 and reprinted in 1976 in the anthology The Killer Mice and in 1981 in the collection Other Stories and...The Attack of the Giant Baby. A family purchases a child bred for intelligence, but neglects it and beats it until it suffers irreparable brain damage. In its brain damaged state the mother finally views it as a normal child.
• "The History Makers", short story by James Sallis, written in 1969. The story is told in a series of letters from a person known as Jim to his brother John. He writes about his stay on an alien planet. The beings there live in an "alternate time span" whereby interaction with humans is nearly impossible. Over the course of the planet's "day" the inhabitants build a city from a rude village. Over the course of the day of city gains in size until it becomes a major metropolises. Than as the day ends the inhabitants began to go through a change. Most go comatose, while others began insanely destroying their city. Eventually the entire city, nicknamed Siva, including ruins is destroyed.

• Quotes

"All my faces had run together like cheap watercolor."

• The Big flash

A short story by Norman Spinrad. Which won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette The pentagon hatches a plan to use atomic warfare in Vietnam War. It had been determined that a single nuclear attack would destroy 2/3 of the enemy's fighting force. In order to get the American population to go along with the idea of nuclear warfare, the pentagon gets a band formed called the four horseman. The band's theme is advocacy of nuclear warfare By funneling money to them the military is able to get them very popular.