“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” is a twisting story about the legend and myth of revolutionaries. Using fake news reports from the past about an agitator named Benny Cemoli, those on Earth who orchestrated a disastrous nuclear war keep a newly arrived intergalactic reconstruction crew (the Centaurus Urban Renewal Bureau aka CURB) occupied chasing this phantom and off their trail.

Cast of characters

• John LeConte – a ‘politico’ on Earth
• Mr. Fall – LeConte’s secretary
• Peter Hood – CURBman from Centaurus
• Joan Hood – Peter Hood’s wife
• Rudolph Fletcher – Hood’s assistant
• Otto Dietrich – the supreme police investigator from Centaurus who vows to make an example of the war criminals responsible for Earth’s nuclear war
• Benny Cemoli – a supposed revolutionary who seized power of North America in a coup
• Stavros – a Greek grocery store owner and supposed follower of Benny Cemoli

Mrs. Berthelson, owner of a small country store in Northern California, has the unique ability to travel through time. Her ‘captive market’ is a group of desperate survivors of a nuclear war in the not too distant future where Mrs. Berthelson travels once a week to sell her goods at whatever price she chooses.

The survivors plan to leave Earth for Venus on a rocket they have constructed, but Mrs. Berthelson, not wanting to give up such a lucrative gig, selects a future where their rocket crashes on takeoff trapping them on Earth as her perpetual customers.

Cast of characters

• Edna Berthelson – owner of a small country store
• Jackie – Mrs. Berthelson’s grandson
• Tellman, Gladys, Barnes, Masterson, Flannery, Patricia, Crowley, Dobbs – survivors of a nuclear war in the future

The human stand-by for the President of the United States (a job held by the supercomputer Unicephalon 40-D) is a union post, and when the current stand-by dies, union officials choose layabout Max Fischer as his successor.

No one expects Unicephalon 40-D to fail, because it never has, but that’s before an army of aliens attacks, knocking out Unicephalon and promoting Fischer to Commander-and-Chief.

Fischer bungles the job, and news clown Jim Briskin claims Fischer isn’t legally President since he was never elected. Briskin then pushes for an election and announces his own candidacy. As Fischer moves to have the FBI silence Briskin, Unicephalon returns to power, declares war with the aliens and puts an end to these presidential shenanigans.

Cast of characters

• Jim Briskin – everyone’s favorite news clown. Briskin also makes a bid for the Presidency in The Crack in Space.
• Unicephalon 40-D – supercomputer / President of the United States
• Maximilian Fischer – union member chosen to be the next stand-by POTUS
• General Tompkins – chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Leon Lait – Fischer’s cousin and Attorney General while Fischer is in charge

A survivor of a war between Venus and Earth appears to somehow travel back in time, arriving on Earth days before the conflict begins when tensions between the two planets is at an all-time high. Earthmen at the City Hospital eventually uncover the Venusian plot to use a simulacra of a war veteran from the future to trick Earth into believing they will lose an upcoming war in order to prevent a war between the planets that Venus doesn’t want to fight.

This pulp potboiler, like a number of other stories Dick wrote in the 1950s, is populated with wooden characters and much too long.

Cast of characters

• David Unger – the titular war vet who supposedly served under Nathan West
• Vachel Patterson – cancer specialist at the City Hospital
• Edwin LeMarr – neurologist at the City Hospital
• Evelyn Cutter – records keeper at the City Hospital
• John V-Stephens – a Venusian surgeon at the City Hospital
• V-Rafia – a Venusian girl rescued from a crazed mob
• Nathan West – Lieutenant on the battleship Wind Giant
• Francis Gannet – owns Transplan Industries

Leon Wiseman is in charge of making sure imported Ganymedean toys are safe for human children. His preoccupation with an ultimately benign group of toy soldiers that storms a citadel allows a Monopoly-like board game to slip through the approval process with ironic results. The end of this one made me laugh.

Cast of characters

• Leon Wiseman – works at the Terran Import Bureau of Standards
• Fowler – Wiseman’s boss
• Pinario – works in the testing labs of the Import Bureau
• Joe Hauck – sales manager at a toy store
• Bobby and Lora Hauck – Joe Hauck’s children

Doc Labyrinth can’t stand the idea that all of our culture’s art, literature and especially music will one day be lost to time. His unorthodox solution is a machine which outputs animals after being fed sheet music of famous composers.

These animals, created from Mozart, Brahms, Bach, etc., eventually make their way into the woods behind his house, and when Doc and his friend next encounter these creatures, they find they have evolved into vicious beasts. When one of these is returned to the machine to be converted back into music the hideous result bears no resemblance to the original score.

Cast of characters

• Doc Labyrinth – inventor of the titular preserving machine
• the unnamed narrator – Doc’s companion