Wilner pointed, his finger trembling as he stared at the screen. "There, ships, hundreds of them! A space fleet!" These were the vessels which had vanished in space over many years. This was the centre of hyperspace, the resting place of derelict star ships, the Sargasso of Space . . .
Release date:
September 29, 2011
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
126
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The Cap Kennedy (F.A.T.E.) Series (E.C. Tubb writing as Gregory Kern)
1: Galaxy of the Lost (1973)
2: Slave Ship from Sergan (1973)
3: Monster of Metelaze (1973)
4: Enemy Within the Skull (1974)
5: Jewel of Jarhen (1974)
6: Seetee Alert! (1974)
7: The Gholan Gate (1974)
8: The Eater of Worlds (1974)
9: Earth Enslaved (1974)
10: Planet of Dread (1974)
11: Spawn of Laban (1974)
12: The Genetic Buccaneer (1974)
13: A World Aflame (1974)
14: The Ghosts of Epidoris (1975)
15: Mimics of Dephene (1975)
16: Beyond the Galactic Lens (1975)
17: The Galactiad (1983)
Alien Dust (1955)
Alien Impact (1952)
Journey Into Terror (originally published as Alien Life (1954, rev 1998))
Atom War on Mars (1952)
Fear of Strangers (first published as C.O.D. – Mars (1968))
Century of the Manikin (1972)
City of No Return (1954)
Death God’s Doom (1999)
Death is a Dream (1967)
Dead Weight (first published as Death Wears a White Face (1979))
Escape into Space (1969)
Footsteps of Angels (2004) (previously unpublished work written c.1988)
Hell Planet (1954)
Journey to Mars (1954)
Moon Base (1964)
Pandora’s Box (1996) (previously unpublished work written 1954)
Pawn of the Omphalos (1980)
S.T.A.R. Flight (1969)
Stardeath (1983)
Starslave (2010) (previously unpublished work written 1984)
Stellar Assignment (1979)
Temple of Death (1996) (previously unpublished work written 1954)
Fifty Days to Doom (first published as The Extra Man (1954))
The Life-Buyer (1965, 2008)
The Luck Machine (1980)
World in Torment (originally published as The Mutants Rebel (1953))
The Primitive (1977)
The Resurrected Man (1954)
The Sleeping City (1999)
The Space-Born (1956)
The Stellar Legion (1954)
To Dream Again (2011)
Venusian Adventure (1953)
Tide of Death (first published as World at Bay (1954))
E. C. Tubb (writing as Arthur MacLean)
The Possessed (revised version of Touch of Evil (1957))
E. C. Tubb (writing as Brian Shaw)
Argentis (1952)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Carl Maddox)
Menace from the Past (1954)
The Living World (1954)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Charles Grey)
Dynasty of Doom (1953)
The Extra Man (first published as Enterprise 2115 (1954) & then as The Mechanical Monarch (1958))
I Fight for Mars (1953)
Space Hunger (1953)
The Hand of Havoc (1954)
Secret of the Towers (originally published as The TormentedCity(1953))
The Wall (1953)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Gill Hunt)
Planetfall (1951)
E. C. Tubb (writing as King Lang)
Saturn Patrol (1951)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Roy Sheldon)
The Metal Eater (1954)
E. C. Tubb (writing as Volsted Gridban)
The Green Helix (originally published as Alien Universe (1952))
Reverse Universe (1952)
Planetoid Disposals Ltd. (1953)
The Freedom Army (originally published as De Bracy’s Drug (1953))
Fugitive of Time (1953)
It stood in a little park; an oasis of green lawns and flowering shrubs, neatly planned flower beds and winding paths. Birds
twittered in cheerful melody and the sweet scent of new-cut grass hung on the warm summer air. Around the park sprawled the
city; a jumble of towering buildings and thread-like elevated roadways. A huge collection of man-made caves, their windows
reflecting the Sun in a million reduced images. A hum came from the city, the sound of speeding wheels and busy machinery,
but in the little park the noise came as a muted drone as of some giant bee in the far distance.
It was green now with the soft patina of age, weathered a little by sun and rain and the snows of many centuries, yet still
retaining a stern and simple dignity.
A statue.
The statue of a man, wide legged, his arms raised towards the heavens and his feet spurning the Earth below. An old man, his
features lined and harsh with strain and self-denial his hair a thin straggle across his domed skull. The sculptor had caught
the essence of the man in ageless bronze, and even after the lapse of hundreds of years the statue still had imprisoned within
it something of the inner fire that must have burned within the man.
The inscription read simply.
“Professor De Fala. Saviour of Man.”
It was enough.
Brett Carson leaned back on the bench and stared at the statue as he had stared for perhaps a dozen times in the past few
minutes. He stretched, feeling the soft black leather of his uniform tighten against the muscles of chest and back, and causing
the sun to glitter from the gold of his insignia on shoulders and breast.
“Well?” said his companion. “Aren’t you curious?”
“A little,” admitted the young space captain, “but when the Comptroller of Federated Earth invites an unknown space captain
to join him in a park and stare at a statue, then there must be a reason.”
“There is.” Sombrely the old man sitting beside the young captain stared at the green tinted statue. He wore the loose blouse
and trousers of civilian raiment, but his eyes stamped him as different from the usual thronging crowds in the city. He sighed
and ran thin fingers through his sparse white hair.
“Look at him, Carson. De Fala, Saviour of Man, inventor of the hyper-drive, the man who freed our race from the twin shackles
of gravitation and the Einstein space-time equations. He was probably the greatest scientist ever to have lived—and he vanished
five hundred years ago.”
“I know of him,” said Brett. “Who doesn’t? Every spaceship captain, every engineer and crewman, anyone who has ever travelled
across the void knows of the De Fala hyper-drive. Without it we’d still be trying to colonise the planets instead of trading
with the entire galaxy.”
He shifted restlessly on the bench, feeling the sun hot and uncomfortable against his face. The old man smiled at him, noting
the thin harsh features, the wide dark eyes and the smooth black hair sweeping from a high forehead. He sighed a little, remembering his own past youth, then forced himself
to concentrate on the business in hand.
“You know who I am, Comptroller of the Federated Earth, which means that I am responsible for the lives and welfare of this
entire region of space, not only our own planet. I have a very specialised duty, I assimilate odd items of information, correlate
them, decide their relationship to each other, and if necessary order the proper adjustments. Machines help me of course,
but the final decision must be my own responsibility.”
“I know that,” said Brett. “Your office took over from the old parliamentary system after it broke down through sheer overwork.
When men exploded into space the old laws were proved unworkable, and so electronic computer machines had to take over. You
oversee the machines.”
“Yes. Do you agree with the system?”
Brett shrugged.
“It works I suppose, but is a Comptroller really necessary?”
The old man wasn’t annoyed, he laughed silently as he stared at the young man, and Brett shifted uncomfortably on the bench.
“I imagine a lot of people think like that,” chuckled the old man. “They don’t begrudge me my position, but they wonder whether
or not it isn’t a waste of good manpower.” He stared seriously at the young space captain.
“You smoke I imagine, most people do. Well then. A few years ago a star in the Sirius sector went nova and filled space with
wild radiations. A little while after that came an outbreak of a particularly unpleasant lung cancer. There seemed to be no connection between the two events, but I discovered that the wild radiation had mutated tobacco
plants in the Sirius sector, and the lung cancer was a direct result of smoking that tobacco. I ordered all tobacco stocks
destroyed and the plants killed. The soil was sterilised and new seeds planted. The epidemic was cured within a few weeks.”
“I remember that,” admitted the young man. “But couldn’t the machines have traced events to the same conclusion?”
“No. The electronic computers store and file items of fact, it takes a man to see the relationship between those facts.”
“Interesting, but …? Brett gestured towards the statue.
“What has that to do with my asking you to sit here with me?” The Comptroller smiled and stared at the soaring grace of the
age-stained bronze. “I have been tracing down a peculiar collection of items, and the more items I am able to correlate into
the general pattern, the more worried I get.”
“A crisis?” Brett stared at the old man at his side. “I remember the last one, a long time ago it was, I must have been a
mere child then, but I recall the excitement, the feeling of tension and the relaxation as the problem was solved.”
“The evacuation of the three planets of Deneb. My computations had shown that a dark star would enter into a collision orbit
with the second planet. The others would have been ster. . .
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