Campaign Progress
0%
The loft of the feed-house, with its stacked grainsacks, was a B-72, a fort, a foxhole—any number of things, depending on Phildee’s moods. Today it was a jumping-off place. Phildee slipped out of his...
Rocket Row is the Joy Street of three planets. It’s got neon lights, crummy dives, cheap hotels, and women to match. Every man who’s ever rode a ship into space knows about Rocket Row. It runs along t...
Mort Weidmann was the same Captain Weidmann who’d left an arm in the cockpit of a K class scoutbomber that he’d flown through a formation of Marties while he almost bled to death. He looked very milit...
I remember lying on my back for quite awhile before I wanted to open my eyes. I knew I wasn’t on the street. The air was warm, and heated, and I was on a bed, or something like it. My leg was giving m...
Flight coveralls are designed to be airtight when fully zipped. Hoods with transparent faceplates and oxygen leads can be hermetically sealed to the collars, and every ship has emergency plug-ins for ...
What was Pat doing, tied up with Thorsten? She was a high grade operator now, as far from the immature tease I’d known at the Academy as I could imagine. Where had she learned to handle a gun like tha...
Titan lay ahead of me, pursuing its track around Saturn. My ship drove toward it, flaming out fuel in reckless amounts as I poured on the acceleration. I had to get there fast. We’d already missed our...
The fleet had scattered back to the hundreds of hidden berths among the farflung Asteroids. I came awake in a pressurized burrow dug out in the particular rock Thorsten had chosen for himself and his ...
The cell was small, dark, and damp. There were stitches across my back, under tape, and a traction splint and bandages on my shoulder. Let’s forget pain. Pain. … Let’s forget it! Forget it! I lay on...
Earth lies ahead of me, green and safe. The muted atomics behind me have brought me back from beyond Venus, where the split-second jump into hyperspace threw me. Let Mort Weidmann have his farther sta...
“Your Majesty!” D’hai Merssu, Emperor of All the Suns, Protector of the Galaxy, looked up calmly as his prime minister burst into the room. His lean, brooding face did not change expression as he watc...
The small young man looked at his father, and shook his head. “But you’ve got to learn a trade,” his father said, exasperated. “I can’t afford to send you to college; you know that.” “I’ve got a trade...
The aging man was sweating profusely, and he darted sidelong glances at the windowless walls of the outer office. By turns, he sat stiffly in a corner chair or paced uneasily, his head swiveling const...
Marlowe was obese. He sat behind his desk like a tuskless sea lion crouched behind a rock, and his cheeks merged into jowls and obliterated his neck. His desk was built specially, so that he could get...
At fifteen-fifteen, the light on his interphone blinked twice, and Marlowe hastily initialed a directive with his right hand while touching the switch with his left. “Yes, Mary?” “Mr. Mead, sir.” “OK....
Dalish ud Klavan was almost a twin for the pictured typical Dovenilid in Marlowe’s library. Since the pictures were usually idealized, it followed that Klavan was an above-average specimen of his peop...
Marlowe stared at his irrevocable clock. His interphone light flickered, and he touched the switch absently. “Yes, Mary?” “Will there be anything else, Mr. Secretary?” “No, thank you, Mary. Good night...
The light flickered on Marlowe’s interphone. “Good morning, Mr. Secretary.” “Good morning, Mary. What’s up?” “Harrison’s being deported from Dovenil, sir. There’s a civil crime charged against him. Qu...
Dalish ud Klavan sat easily in his chair opposite Marlowe. He rested one digit on his notebook and waited. “Ud Klavan,” Marlowe said amiably, “you’re undoubtedly aware by now that your opposite number...
Martin Holliday climbed slowly out of the shuttle’s lock and moved fumblingly down the stairs, leaning on the attendant’s arm. His face was a mottled gray, and his hands shook uncontrollably. He stepp...
Dalish ud Klavan, stooped and withered, sat hopelessly, opposite Marlowe, who sat behind his desk like a grizzled polar bear, his thinning mane of white hair unkempt and straggling. “Marlowe, my peopl...
It was just as he saw the Barbarian’s squat black tankette lurch hurriedly into a nest of boulders that young Giulion Geoffrey realized he had been betrayed. With the muzzle of his own cannon still ho...
Know him? Yes, I know him—knew him. That was twenty years ago. Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different ...
Soft as the voice of a mourning dove, the telephone sounded at Rufus Sollenar’s desk. Sollenar himself was standing fifty paces away, his leonine head cocked, his hands flat in his hip pockets, watchi...
Drifting slowly on the thread of his spinneret, Rufus Sollenar came gliding down the wind above Cortwright Burr’s building. The building, like a spider, touched the ground at only the points of its le...
Rufus Sollenar paced his office, his hands held safely still in front of him, their fingers spread and rigid. The telephone sounded, and his secretary said to him: “Mr. Sollenar, you are ten minutes f...
Long Island Facility vaulted at the stars in great kangaroo-leaps of arch and cantilever span, jeweled in glass and metal as if the entire port were a mechanism for navigating interplanetary space. Ru...
The door opened, and Martians stood looking. They were spindly-limbed and slight, their faces framed by folds of leathery tissue. Their mouths were lipped with horn as hard as dentures, and pursed, fo...
The other one—Charpantier, he called himself—he and I were going back up the hill to the Foundation, carrying our bags, when I happened to remark I didn’t think the Veld was sane anymore. (I call my...
I’ve come a long, long way to die alone, David Greaves thought as Defiance tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly torn apart by the explosion in her engines. On the console in front of ...
The woman—the sensuous ivory-skinned woman with eyes like dark jewels and hair like midnight framing her red-lipped face—kissed him again and then drew back to touch his cheek. “Wake,” she whispered...
Greaves, Adelie and Vigil stood beside the beast-couch. “All right,” Greaves said. “Now there are things I want to know, and I want no quarrels, Vigil.” “And by what right do you order me around?” the...
During the night, he asked Adelie: “I’m supposed to fight him with my hands, is that it? Or with simple weapons of some kind? And this will prove to the worshippers all over the Universe or to the Sha...
