OUR MAN IN SPACE by Bruce W. Ronald
THIS FUTURE JAMES BOND WAS AN INTERSTELLAR MISSILE. Bill Brown was a second-rate actor who happened to look enough like a dead spy from the planet Troll to qualify as one-fourth of Earth’s Interplanetary Secret Service. His assignment was simply to impersonate Harry Gordon, the dead agent, plant false information as to the length of time it would take Earth to die of population suffocation, and return to Earth 10,000 credits richer. It was only when Brown-Gordon got to Troll that he realized things were somewhat more complex. It turned out that Brown had been sold out by his government; that Earth didn’t give a hoot about the life of its new amateur spy… and there was a little bomb inside Bill Brown’s head that Earth was 80% sure would go off!’
Cover art by Ed Valigursky

ULTIMATUM IN 2050 A.D. by John Sharkey
PACKAGED PEOPLE IN A WORLD GONE BERSERK.
It was the year 2050 A.D. and the Hive, with its ten million inhabitants, was going along as smoothly as ever. Except that, on a whim, Kinsman Lloyd Bodger, Jr. had helped a fugitive girl escape hospitalization, and she had told him her secret. “There are no hospitals! There is only death!” Of course it couldn’t be true. Lloyd Bodger’s own father was second in command of the Hive, the first true democracy.
“But Why,” she had said, “doesn’t anyone ever return from hospitalization? Why is the population always a constant ten million?”
Well, young Bodger reasoned grimly, he would soon know the truth. For hiding the fugitive girl, he himself would either be hospitalized, or fed into the incinerator chutes!
Cover art by John Schoenherr