Assassin and Blind Spot

Two classic short stories from The Golden Age of Science Fiction by Bascom Jones. Featured here: ''Assassin'' and ''Blind Spot''. Excerpt from ''Assassin'': ''I deliberately dug my heels into the concrete floor of the corridor of the Pentagon. The steel plates on the heels of my black uniform boots heralded my approach with sharp anvil sounds as I marched confidently toward the unmarked door five hundred feet ahead. What was that expression used by Earth people of the 20th century? I shifted back through my training, shuffled through the facts about Earth''s past history with which I had been indoctrinated, searching for the word. Assassin! That was it. But the term fell short. It lacked in magnitude. There was a difference in the murder of one person and the assassination of the occupants of an entire planet! One foot in front of the other, I paced off the distance toward the end of the hallway, carefully duplicating the strut which was a trademark of the Earth Council''s Security Police. I''d practiced the peculiar, jolting method of walking a thousand times, but I began to feel the effects of Earth''s heavier gravity before I had covered half the distance. It had been impossible to simulate the difference in gravity in my training. The two guards standing outside the door alertly watched my approach. When I was still four paces away, one of them ordered me to stop. They ignored as though they were not there the gold stars prominently displayed on the shoulders of my tunic. The guard on the left said, ''Your ID card, sir.''