Introduction

There is a particular pleasure in discovering a story that refuses to take itself too seriously while taking its ideas very seriously indeed. The Ambulance Made Two Trips is exactly that kind of tale—a brisk, witty, and surprisingly warm slice of speculative fiction from one of the genre’s most reliable craftsmen. To open these pages is to step into the company of a writer who spent more than half a century learning precisely how to delight a reader, and who, by the time he wrote stories like this one, could do it almost effortlessly. What you hold is a modern translation and adaptation, gently smoothed for the contemporary reader so that nothing stands between you and the sheer fun of the thing, while preserving every ounce of the cleverness and charm that made the original such a treat.

Before you begin, it is worth pausing to understand a little about the man who wrote it, the world that shaped it, and the peculiar magic of the kind of fiction it represents. None of what follows will spoil the experience waiting for you—rest assured, the surprises remain entirely intact—but a bit of context will sharpen your appreciation and let you settle into the rhythm of the story with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what sort of adventure they have signed up for.

The author listed on this volume, Murray Leinster, was the pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1896. If that birth year gives you pause, it should: Jenkins began publishing fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century and was still producing work in the 1960s. That is an astonishing span. He lived through the dawn of powered flight, two world wars, the rise of radio and then television, the atomic age, and the early years of the space race—and he wrote his way through all of it, often anticipating the very technologies that would come to define each era. Few writers have ever had a longer or more consistently inventive career, and fewer still managed to keep their sense of humor and humanity intact across so many decades of relentless change.

Jenkins never finished high school in the formal sense; his education came largely from voracious reading and an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. That curiosity is the secret engine of nearly everything he wrote. He was, by temperament, a tinkerer and a problem-solver, and he held actual patents—most famously for a technique called front projection that became a standard tool in film and television special effects. This is not incidental trivia. The mind that could devise a practical solution to a real-world technical problem is the same mind that animates his fiction, where heroes are rarely musclebound saviors and far more often clever, observant people who notice the one detail everyone else has overlooked and figure out what to do about it.

He earned the affectionate and entirely deserved nickname “the Dean of Science Fiction.” It was not a title bestowed lightly. Jenkins was one of the first writers to imagine, in detail, a global computer network that ordinary people would consult for information—an idea he laid out decades before anything resembling the internet existed. He wrote about parallel universes, alternate histories, first contact with alien intelligences, and the messy practical consequences of new technologies, all with a steady, unpretentious clarity that made the strangest concepts feel grounded and plausible. He understood, perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, that the most interesting thing about a fantastic premise is not the premise itself but the human beings who have to live with it.

What distinguishes Jenkins from many of his peers, then and now, is his fundamental decency and his refusal to let cleverness curdle into coldness. His stories are populated by recognizable people—competent professionals, harried officials, ordinary folks caught up in extraordinary circumstances—who behave with a believable mixture of bewilderment, ingenuity, and good humor. He had a particular fondness for the practical man and woman, the kind of person who, faced with an impossible situation, rolls up their sleeves and starts working the problem rather than delivering a speech about it. This grounded, hands-on sensibility gives even his most outlandish tales a comforting sturdiness. You always feel, reading Jenkins, that you are in the hands of someone who respects both his subject and his audience.

He wrote across an enormous range of genres beyond science fiction—westerns, mysteries, adventure stories, romances—often under various pen names, simply because a working writer in his era had to be versatile to make a living. This breadth shows in his science fiction, which never feels insular or self-referential. He brought the pacing of pulp adventure, the puzzle-logic of detective fiction, and the warmth of popular romance to bear on his speculative work, and the result is a body of fiction that remains remarkably accessible and entertaining to readers who might otherwise find vintage science fiction stiff or dated. He wanted, above all, to tell a good story well, and he understood that a good story is one a reader cannot bear to put down.

A Title That Tells You Everything and Nothing

Consider, for a moment, the title of this book: The Ambulance Made Two Trips. It is a small marvel of comic understatement, and it tells you a great deal about the kind of experience you are about to have. Notice what it does not say. It does not promise galactic war, or the end of the world, or the heroic conquest of the stars. It promises an ambulance—a humble, even mundane vehicle—and it informs us, with deadpan precision, that this ambulance made two trips. Why two? What happened on the first that necessitated the second? The phrasing is so dry, so matter-of-fact, that it practically dares you to laugh, and it perfectly captures Leinster’s signature blend of the cosmic and the comic.

The subtitle expands the promise just enough to whet the appetite: a tale of medicine, chaos, and Martians. Here, then, is the collision at the heart of the book. On one side stands the orderly, rational, deeply human world of medicine—a profession built on diagnosis, treatment, and the careful management of crisis. On the other side stands the great unknown of the cosmos, embodied by that most enduring of pulp-era figures, the Martian. And between them, lubricating the whole machine, is chaos: the glorious, escalating, comic mayhem that ensues when the methodical world of doctors and ambulances suddenly has to contend with something it was never trained to handle.

This is one of the great pleasures of Leinster at his best. He loved to take the ordinary machinery of everyday life—a hospital, an emergency response, a small town’s worth of professionals doing their jobs—and drop something utterly impossible into the middle of it, then watch how the system responds. The comedy and the tension both arise from the same source: competent people trying to apply ordinary procedures to a wildly extraordinary problem. There is something deeply satisfying about watching characters insist on filling out the proper paperwork, following the correct protocols, and maintaining professional decorum in the face of the genuinely unbelievable. It is funny, yes, but it is also strangely reassuring, a quiet tribute to the human instinct to impose order on the universe even when the universe has no intention of cooperating.

The mid-twentieth century, when stories like this flourished, was positively saturated with Martians. The Red Planet held a grip on the popular imagination that is difficult to overstate. Ever since the late nineteenth century, when astronomers reported seeing what they took to be artificial canals crisscrossing the Martian surface, the idea of an intelligent neighboring civilization had captured writers and readers alike. Mars became the default home of the alien, the nearest plausible source of visitors from beyond Earth, and a convenient mirror in which humanity could examine its own anxieties and hopes. By the time Leinster was writing, the Martian had become a beloved fixture of popular fiction—sometimes terrifying, sometimes comic, sometimes both at once.

What is delightful about the way Leinster typically deploys such elements is his refusal to treat them with either solemn dread or empty spectacle. Where some writers used Martians as instruments of apocalyptic terror and others as mere set dressing for ray-gun adventures, Leinster tended to approach the fantastic with a raised eyebrow and a problem-solver’s pragmatism. The question he loved to ask was not “How magnificent and terrible is this thing?” but rather “All right, this has happened—now what on earth do we actually do about it?” That shift in emphasis, from awe to practicality, is what gives his work its distinctive flavor and its enduring readability. It transforms the alien from a symbol into a situation, and situations can be funny, frustrating, and humanly relatable in ways that pure symbols never can.

So when you read that the ambulance made two trips, savor the implication. Something has gone wrong—or right—in a way that required not one but two journeys. The mundane vehicle of human emergency has been pressed into service for a crisis it was never designed to address. That is the comic engine of the whole enterprise, and it is a uniquely Leinsterian conceit: the great cosmic mystery rendered manageable, almost domestic, by the stubborn, slightly absurd persistence of ordinary human systems.

The Art of the Adaptation and How to Read It

A word, now, about the nature of this particular edition, because it shapes the experience in ways worth understanding before you begin. This is described as a modern translation, adapted for the contemporary reader. What does that mean in practice, and why should it matter to you?

Fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century, however brilliant, inevitably carries the linguistic fingerprints of its era. Sentence structures were often more elaborate; certain idioms and references that were instantly clear to readers in 1950 have since faded into obscurity; the rhythm of dialogue followed conventions that can feel slightly formal or stilted to a modern ear. None of this diminishes the genius of the original work, but it can create a small but real barrier between the contemporary reader and the pleasures the author intended. A modern adaptation aims to dissolve that barrier—to clear away the incidental dust of changing language so that the timeless qualities of the story shine through unobstructed.

The goal of a thoughtful adaptation is never to replace the author’s vision but to serve it. The wit, the ingenuity, the warmth, the comic timing, the satisfying logic of the plot—all of this is preserved and, ideally, made more immediately accessible. Think of it as the literary equivalent of carefully cleaning and restoring an old painting: the image was always magnificent, but now you can see it clearly, without the yellowed varnish of intervening decades coming between you and the artist’s intention. The colors are the same colors the painter chose; you are simply seeing them as they were meant to be seen.

This matters especially for a writer like Leinster, whose appeal was always rooted in clarity and momentum. He was not a stylist who buried his meaning in dense, ornate prose; he was a storyteller who prized readability above almost everything else. He wanted his readers to turn pages quickly, to be carried along by the unfolding of events, to laugh and gasp and grin at the right moments. A modern adaptation honors that priority by ensuring the prose moves with the briskness Leinster himself would have wanted, free of any old-fashioned friction that might slow a contemporary reader down. In a very real sense, an adaptation like this brings the book closer to the experience its original readers had—reading it as a fresh, current, immediate entertainment rather than as a historical artifact to be admired from a respectful distance.