000 02650cam a22004093u 4500
001 76849
003 UtSlPG
005 20260610134759.0
006 m
007 cr n
008 260607r20251949utu|||||o|||||||||||||| d
040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _aen
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aPS
100 1 _aLeinster, Murray,
_d1896-1975
245 1 0 _aThis star shall be free
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
490 1 _aProduced from the November 1949 issue of Super Science Stories.
500 _aRelease date is 2025-09-10
508 _aRoger Frank
520 _a"This star shall be free by Murray Leinster" is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It follows an alien ecological experiment imposed on prehistoric humans, using advanced tools and a compulsion device to explore how abundance and technology might reshape a species and its future, with themes of unintended consequences and cultural acceleration. A young cave-dweller named Tork is drawn by an alien ship’s mind-urge to its landing site, where water-dwelling Antareans gift him a device that summons living creatures and simple but transformative weapons like flint-tipped spears, knives, and bows. The tribe feasts, spreads the tools, and chaos follows as others covet the new power. When theft hits home, Tork cleverly retunes the summoning device to the aliens themselves by drawing their likeness on cave walls, trapping the ship until it trades more tools for the destruction of those images—accidentally launching the tradition of cave art and cementing humanity’s rapid rise. Millennia later, the aliens return to colonize Earth’s oceans, only to be annihilated by the now spacefaring descendants of those cave-folk, revealing the long arc of consequences set in motion by one “kind” experiment. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cKokomo, IN: Fictioneers, Inc., 1949
653 _aScience fiction
653 _aShort stories
653 _aHuman-alien encounters -- Fiction
653 _aPrehistoric peoples -- Fiction
653 _aExperiments -- Fiction
653 _aEarth (Planet) -- Fiction
700 1 _aStevens, Lawrence Sterne,
_d1886-1960
830 0 _aProduced from the November 1949 issue of Super Science Stories.
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/Super_Science_Stories_v06n01_1949-11
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76849
999 _c117574
_d117574