E.C. Tubb SF Gateway Omnibus

by E.C. Tubb

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

An introduction to one of the greats of British adventure SF, including a never-before-published novel A prolific author of hundreds of stories in the fields of SF, fantasy, and westerns, E. C. Tubb was best-known for his epic 33-volume Dumarest saga, a galaxy-spanning adventure series. Also active for many years in fandom, he was both a founding member of the British Science Fiction Association and the first editor of its critical journal Vector. This omnibus collects two of his out of print classics, The Extra Man and The Space-Born, and the posthumous novel Fires of Satan, completed before his death and published now for the first time.

Release date: May 1, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 320

Sample

Edwin Charles Tubb (1919–2010) was a UK writer and editor who was also active for many years in Fandom, beginning in the 1930s with the Science Fiction Association; in 1958 he was both a founder member of the British Science Fiction Association and the first editor of its critical journal Vector. Meanwhile, Tubb had begun publishing sf, with ‘No Short Cuts’ in New Worlds for Summer 1951, and for the next half decade or so produced a great amount of fiction, in UK magazines and in book form, under his own name and under many pseudonyms.

His total output is in excess of 130 novels and 230 short stories. Of his many pseudonyms, those known to have been used for book titles of sf interest include Charles Grey, Gregory Kern, Carl Maddox, Edward Thompson and the House Names Volsted Gridban, Gill Hunt, King Lang, Arthur Maclean, Brian Shaw and Roy Sheldon. At least fifty further names were used for magazine stories only. His first sf novels were pseudonymous: Saturn Patrol (1951) as by King Lang, Planetfall (1951) as by Gill Hunt, ‘Argentis’ (1952) as by Brian Shaw and Alien Universe (1952 chap) as by Volsted Gridban. He soon began publishing under his own name, with Alien Impact (1952) and Atom War on Mars (1952), though his best work in these very early years was probably published as by Charles Grey, beginning with The Wall (1953). Of his enormous output of magazine fiction, the Dusty Dribble stories in Authentic Science Fiction (1955–1956) stand out; Tubb also edited Authentic from February 1956 to its demise in October 1957. After the mid-1950s, his production moderated somewhat, and he wrote relatively few stories after 1960 or so, but he remained a prolific author of consistently readable Space Operas until the early 1980s, and could have continued indefinitely had the market for adventure sf not collapsed. Readers’ taste for adventure sf was now being satisfied by novels tied to Star Trek, Star Wars and other franchises.

With Enterprise 2115 (1954; later published as The Extra Man in 2000) (see below) and Alien Dust (1955), Tubb began to produce more sustained adventure tales, solidly told, memorably plotted, arousing. The Space-Born (1956) (see below) is a crisp Generation Starship tale. These novels all display a convincing expertise in the use of the language and themes of Pulp-magazine sf, though stripped of some of its pre-War excesses. But Tubb always resisted the strictures of American Hard SF; the comparatively sober Moon Base (1964) comes as close to the nitty-gritty of the Near Future as he was ever inclined to go.

The next decade saw relatively few Tubb titles, until the start of the long series for which he remains best known, the Dumarest books beginning with The Winds of Gath (1967) and terminating abruptly, after thirty-one instalments, with The Temple of Truth (1985), before the climax of the series had been reached. Tubb had himself planned to bring Dumarest to a relatively early conclusion, but Donald A. Wollheim of DAW Books persuaded him to eke it out; unfortunately – and in fact very strangely – the series was cut short by his successors as soon as Wollheim died, leaving the firm in possession of a truncated epic, which was duly allowed to go out of print. Tubb had in fact written a further volume, which was first published in French under the title Le Retour (1992); the English-language edition is The Return (1997). The long tale is in fact simple: Earl Dumarest, who features in each volume, persists with soldier-of-fortune fortitude in his long search through the galaxy for lost Earth – the planet on which he was born, and from which he was wrested at an early age – but must battle against the universal belief that Earth is a myth. Inhabited planets are virtually innumerable; the period is some time after the collapse of a Galactic Empire, and everyone speaks the same language; and, as Dumarest moves gradually outwards from Galactic Centre along a spiral arm of stars – a progress through the vast archipelago of planets strongly evocative of the Fantastic Voyages of earlier centuries, and bears some resemblance to the work of his great American contemporary, Jack Vance (1916–2013) – it is clear that he is gradually nearing his goal. The opposition he faces from the Cyclan – a vast organization of passionless humans linked cybernetically to a central organic Computer whose location is unknown – long led readers to assume that the Cyclan HQ was located on Earth, but The Return is inconclusive about this; a further novel Child of Earth (2009), continues the series, but still leaves unresolved Dumarest’s long search for the home base of the Cyclan. Tubb had saved its resolution for the next (perhaps final) book, but he died before it could be written. Though some of the later-middle titles were relatively aimless, Tubb showed consistent skill at prolonging Dumarest’s intense suspense about the outcome of his long quest; and readers who enjoy his singletons may find the thirty-three volumes of Dumarest enticing.

Of the authors who began to work under the extraordinary conditions (low pay, fixed lengths, huge productivity demands) of early 1950s sf in the UK, Tubb and his colleague Kenneth Bulmer (1921–2005) were unique in retaining some of the harum-scarum writing habits of the early days while managing to gain considerable success in the rather tougher American market for sf adventures, as published by firms like Ace Books and DAW Books, whose standards were remarkably high. Though that market did disappear around 1980, Tubb remained moderately active, continuing to write and publish sf in relatively minor markets until his death in 2010, though he made no serious attempt to become a writer of the new (more demanding, and significantly more pretentious) versions of Space Opera that emerged from about 1990 on. But some of his 1950s space operas were as good as any written at the time; by the end of his long career he had probably become the field’s most prolific producer of good sf adventures. He would have thought that high praise; as do his readers.

The first of the three tales selected here, The Extra Man (1954), deals swiftly, and with Tubb’s typical generosity, with Reincarnation, the Superman theme, and Cybernetics, along with a matriarchal Dystopia; though the sustaining narrative – the pilot of the first spaceship returns from frozen sleep to reinvigorate a world gone wrong through its misuse of a prediction-generating computer – hardly seems to allow much justice to be done to any one concept. This may have been a valid comment in 1954, when the pace of sf stories was slower; today, the tale seems to careen along its course at just the right speed. The Space-Born (1956) displays the same deft pell-mell touch. In 1962 it was adapted as a 90-minute television play on French television, and has been widely translated in Europe.

Of real interest to lovers of Tubb’s work is the third novel here presented. Though he had long been semi-retired – partly due to health problems – Tubb never relinquished his love for the field he had worked so hard at satisfying for so long. Fires of Satan is his last work, finished only weeks before he died. An asteroid threatens to destroy our planet. Men leap into space to fight back. What happens next, let an old man greatly experienced in telling tales do his job once more. Let him take us to the very end.

For a more detailed version of the above, see E. C. Tubb’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/tubb_e_c

Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Although The Extra Man was written in the Autumn of 1953, it was not published until November 1954. E. C. Tubb had submitted his manuscript to the newly established UK paperback firm of Milestone Limited, for whom he was regularly writing novels under his ‘Charles Grey’ personal pseudonym. The book was accepted and a cover prepared for early paperback publication. The publishers were so taken with the book that they subsequently decided to publish it in a hardcover format, and asked Tubb to add another chapter to the book, to increase its length. However, in the cavalier fashion of the day, as they had already prepared a cover for The Extra Man, they put this on another book Tubb had sent them in the interim, discarding its correct title, and this quite different book was issued under the wrong title in February 1954. When the genuine The Extra Man was eventually published in its lengthened version in November 1954, the publisher unaccountably gave it the totally inappropriate title of Enterprise 2115! For this new SF Gateway edition, the original correct title has been restored!

This novel was the last of Tubb’s early ‘pulp’ novels to be published in his prolific ‘mushroom’ period, 1951–1954. In many ways, it can be seen as a transitional work. It is written in a tighter, more controlled manner, but its cool prose is still leavened with occasional flashes of near-poetry:

‘… dim lights gleamed for an instant, gleamed and died like the fading embers of forgotten hope.’

Tubb’s book was written before the actual advent of manned space flight, when, outside of the scientists and military technicians actually working (largely in secret) on rocket research, the conquest of space was still regarded as something of a dream, and an article of faith by science fiction fans. The first man into space was seen as rather a romantic figure, and in his characterisation of Curt Rosslyn, the pioneer space pilot, Tubb conveys something of his own feeling regarding the conquest of space.

The night before his flight into space, Rosslyn, looks at the vessel which is to carry him into history:

‘A space ship.

Curt stared at it as he had stared at it a million times in imagination and in reality.

For him it was the final realisation of ambition, the solid proof that he was not living in a dream. Before him rose the space ship, real, solid, fact. A dream made tangible, a thing of ten thousand hopes and eternal longing from countless men crystallised into something which would finally reach for the stars.

And he was its pilot.’

And after the take-off, Rosslyn:

 

‘… didn’t need to glance out of the ports at the ebon night of space. He didn’t need the sight of the scintillant stars, bright and burning with their cold white fire against the soft velvet of the void. He knew.

Of all men he was the first. The new Columbus. The hero of every boy and man who had ever stared at the sky and wished for wings to travel between the stars.

He was in space.’

Rosslyn’s great friend is the brilliant scientist and computer expert, Comain. He is the designer of his experimental spacecraft, and shares his friend’s longing to open up the space frontier. Physically unable to make the flight himself, he hopes to vicariously share Rosslyn’s glory.

But Tubb had considerable scientific knowledge, and he knew that the romanticised view of space travel disguised the very real technical and engineering difficulties. He knew the dangers, and with uncanny prescience, he postulates an accident in space that clearly anticipated the later real-life Apollo 13 mission. In adopting this realistic, logical approach to space travel, Tubb was almost alone amongst his pulp contemporaries, most of whom saw space flight as akin to a futuristic taxi-ride!

Unlike the crew of Apollo 13, Rosslyn is unable to get back to Earth, and he dies in space. At this point, events parallel the story of Tubb’s other novel of revival from death in space, The Resurrected Man (1954). Years later, Rosslyn’s body is found drifting in space, and is revived by the scientists of a renegade faction of Martian colonists. Over two centuries have passed, and Comain’s computer researches have been misapplied by successive ruthless governments. Earth is now a regimented Matriarchy, ruled by computer prediction!

Rosslyn becomes the willing pawn of the Martian dissidents and is smuggled back to Earth. Everyone is computer indexed—except Rosslyn! As an ‘Extra Man’ and an unknown quantity, he causes havoc. And then—? You simply must read this fast-moving and engrossing story for yourself. Whilst the action is always logical, Tubb also manages to produce a really surprising science fictional twist, which is as satisfying as it is unexpected. Significantly, the quality of the novel was also recognised by American editors, and the book was reprinted in America in 1958 under the more appropriate title of The Mechanical Monarch. It is now deservedly available again as an SF Gateway e-book.

Writing in a major science fiction reference book, The New Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction (1988) the noted critic and academic Stephen H. Goldman recorded that ‘Tubb is, moreover, a master at handling the conventional material of SF. His use of a generation starship in The Space-Born (also reprinted in this present SF Gateway Tubb Omnibus edition) and cybernetics in Enterprise 2115 (aka The Extra Man) … are as good as any to be found in the genre.’

I would certainly not quarrel with this assessment, and thanks to this present volume, modern readers can now judge for themselves. And the even better news for readers is that all of Tubb’s classic science fiction novels are currently being made available as e-books in the ongoing SF Gateway series. Watch out for them, and spread the word … E. C. TUBB, THE GURU OF SPACE ADVENTURE IS BACK!

 

Philip Harbottle,

Wallsend,

October, 2013.

From the gentle slope of the foothills Poker Flats stretched like a frozen sea beneath the cold light of a near-full Moon. Shadows blotched the surface, black pools against the grey-white, thrown from swelling dunes and wind-blown rock, collecting in ebon patches and inky channels, etching the unevenness of the desert. They made an odd pattern those shadows, an irregular polka-dot pattern of light and dark, strange, a little alien, almost disturbing in the deep silence of the night.

Watching them, Curt Rosslyn could almost imagine that he was no longer on Earth.

He leaned against a crumbling boulder, a slight man, not tall, not heavily built, but with a litheness and easiness of movement that betrayed hidden strength. Behind him the Organ Mountains reared their jagged crests against the star-shot sky, and far out across the wastes of Poker Flats, dim lights gleamed for an instant, gleamed and died like the fading embers of forgotten hope.

He sighed a little, his grey eyes clouded with dreams as he stared at the shadowed desert and the worn mountains. Mars must be something like this, he thought. Or perhaps the airless craters of the Moon, or even the sun-scorched surface of distant Mercury. He sighed again, tilting his head and staring up towards the burning glory of the heavens, idly tracing the well-remembered constellations.

The Big Dipper, Polaris the Dog Star, and the sprawling length of Draco. The regular shape of Cassiopeia and the angular shape of Andromeda with its misty nebula. Cross-shaped Bootes, and the scintillant cluster of the Pleiades. Glowing Fomalhaut, and the splendour of Vega. Low on the horizon Rigel and Betelgeuse blazed in the glory of Orion, warning of the winter to come, and above all, glowing like a tracery of shimmering gems, the heart-stopping splendour of the Milky Way.

He knew them all, had known them for as long as he could remember, and the familiar constellations felt like old friends. He had squinted at them through the lenses of his first crude telescope. Then, after many weary hours, he had stared at them with the aid of a hand-ground mirror and the extra power of his six-inch reflector had opened new worlds of glory. He had seen the satellites of Jupiter, the transit of Venus and Mercury, studied the ‘canals’ of Mars and walked in imagination on the dusty sea bottoms of the Moon. The Moon! He smiled up at it, winking at the splotched face of the satellite, then, obeying the warning of finely-turned reflexes, turned and stared over the desert.

Light and sound came towards him.

Twin streamers of brilliance stabbed across the desert, dispelling the shadows and ruining the alien atmosphere with the harsh reality of commonsense. The headlights swung and dipped, rose towards the stars and veered from rock and heaped dunes of arid sand. With the approach of the headlights the sound of the jeep sent flat echoes from the age-old heights of the Organ Mountains, and Curt sighed, relaxing against his boulder and fumbling in his pockets for cigarettes.

‘Rosslyn?’

‘Yes.’ Curt threw away his butt and stepped towards the vehicle. ‘Comain?’

‘That’s right.’ A tall, lean, almost emaciated figure unfolded itself from behind the wheel and in the starlight Curt could see the pale face and thick-lensed spectacles of his friend. ‘Time to go back, Curt. I volunteered to collect you, the driver was busy winning a hundred dollar pot.’

‘I could have waited.’ Curt stared at the stars again, almost forgetting that he was no longer alone. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’ Something in the tall man’s voice made Curt glance at him, then look away. ‘They’re clean and bright and wonderful, Curt – and they’re waiting. New worlds, new peoples, new ideals and cultures. New frontiers, Curt, and we’re on the threshold of opening the way.’

‘Perhaps, but it won’t be for a long time yet.’

‘No, Curt. The first step is always the hardest. First we have to break the gravitational drag, lift a ship from the surface and keep it off. Once we have done that the rest must follow. First a trip around the Moon and back again. Then an actual landing on the satellite. After that, Mars, Venus, even Mercury and Jupiter. It may take time, Curt, but it will be done.’

The tall man fell silent as he stared at the brilliant face of the near-full Moon. Taller than Curt, stoop shouldered, thin-faced and weak-eyed, yet his high forehead and large skull told of the intelligence residing in his ungainly body. His hands were thin and slender, the fingers long and supple, the hands of an artist, an idealist, a dreamer. Ambition burned within him, not the normal ambition of the majority of men, for wealth meant nothing to him, but the relentless ambition of the scholar. He was driven by the twin devils of curiosity and speculation. He wondered, and he built, then wondered again and built afresh. He would never stop until his eyes closed in the final sleep. He was that kind of man.

A thin wind blew across the desert, stirring the sand a little and chilling their blood. Curt shivered, then, as if ashamed of himself, tried to ignore the warnings of his body.

‘Better get back,’ said Comain quietly. ‘You don’t want to catch a cold now.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You shivered and it’s getting colder.’ Comain started towards the jeep. ‘Come on, Curt.’

‘I’m not cold,’ said the slight man irritably. ‘It’s just that they’ve starved me until I don’t own an ounce of fat.’ He stared at his slender arm. ‘Look at me! Just skin and bone with a bit of muscle! I couldn’t knock down a midget, the shape I’m in now.’

‘You know better than that.’ Comain smiled ruefully as he stared at his own arm. ‘You’ve got muscle, trained and developed to a high pitch of efficiency. Me?’ He bit his lip and continued towards the vehicle. ‘What do I need brawn for?’

‘You don’t.’ Curt fell into step with the tall man and their feet scuffed against the desert as they walked towards the silent jeep. ‘And neither do I. Not with all those gadgets you built. Why, man, all I have to do is to press buttons. Those things you fitted should be able to operate the ship on their own.’

‘The servo mechanisms?’ Comain smiled. ‘They will help but they can only do what you direct them to do. The final decision must be yours.’

He halted by the side of the jeep and folded his long body behind the wheel. Curt sat beside him, then, as they began jolting over the desert, clung to the metal frame of the windscreen.

‘You know,’ he said above the whine of the engine. ‘I should have thought it possible to build a robot pilot for the first ship. Could you do that?’

‘Yes.’ Comain stared before him, his weak eyes narrowed a little as he steered the vehicle over the undulating sand. He wasn’t deceived, and yet he felt grateful to Curt for easing his inner pain. They had grown up together, sharing their boyhood, discovering the stars and the mysteries of science at the same time. Both had dreamed the same dreams, weaving impossible worlds of romantic mystery with their youthful imaginations. They had argued, built, planned, even fought a little. They had helped each other, and, as the years passed, had grown closer even than brothers.

But now they had to part.

Little things had decided it. Weak eyes against perfect vision. Weight against weight, height against height, reflex against reflex. They had been tested, examined, checked – and Curt had won.

To him had fallen the honour of being the Columbus of space.

Comain had known it for more than five years now. He had watched his body, his frail, stooped, weak body, and he had known. Ambition had not died with the knowledge but had been channeled into a different path. Not for him the glories of space, but science covered a wide field and cybernetics was something in which he could take a keen interest. And so he had turned to the design of more and more efficient machines. Small and compact, with built-in relays and predictable response to external stimuli. He had designed the controls for the space ship, the things of metal that could operate faster, better, than the muscles of any man.

And yet his hurt had been deep and something of the old pain still lingered.

‘I could build a mechanical pilot,’ he said. ‘I could build one better than any man, but we’re up against weight limitations, Curt, and no machine now known can do what a man can do within that limitation.’

‘Good.’ Curt grinned with a flash of white teeth. ‘I don’t care what you do later, Comain, but I’m glad that you’ve had to admit defeat now. I’ve looked forward to this for a long time and I’d hate for you to replace me with a thing of steel and wire.’

‘No chance of that.’ Comain swung the wheel as he guided the jeep around a jagged mound of rock. ‘They’re interested in discovering just what will happen to a man out there. You’re a guinea pig, Curt, my day will come after they finally realise that the human body can’t stand high G without damage. Then we’ll have ships with the passengers in acceleration tanks and robots at the controls.’

‘Maybe.’ Curt grunted as the vehicle bounced and jarred his teeth. ‘How’s your research going on the Great Idea?’

‘The predictor?’ The thin man shrugged. ‘It’ll come, Curt, it will have to come. They’ve got EINAC already and better computers will be built. One day they’ll realise that a machine able to absorb information and then to predict probable events from that information will be essential if we are to advance this civilisation of ours.’ His thin lips twisted cynically as he stared at the desert before him. ‘Probably the next war will do it.’

‘You think that there’ll be one?’

‘I do. Every thinking man does. We’ve managed to negotiate an uneasy peace but the weapons are ready, the men are waiting, and the same tensions still exist. War will come, Curt, it can’t be avoided, and, in a way, it could be a good thing.’

‘A good thing! Are you crazy?’

‘No. Look at it this way, Curt. Each war has brought rapid scientific advancement. The First World War brought the development of flight, the advancement of surgery, the use of strange machines. The second brought the jet engine, the atomic bomb, the proximity fuse. The third …’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? We may all die from the alphabet bombs but if we don’t we may stumble on something quite new.’

‘The predictor?’

‘Naturally, but I didn’t mean that. The predictor isn’t new, and it will come, war or no war. I mean something different, new, perhaps something not even imagined yet.’

He grunted as the jeep bounced over the edge of a wide road and with a sweep of his hand disengaged the low register. The swaying headlights steadied as they spun along the smooth road and the flickering hand of the speedometer crawled across the dial as the thin man trod on the throttle.

‘The Colonel was furious at your taking off like that,’ he explained above the rush of displaced air. ‘I tried to tell him how you felt but he didn’t seem to understand.’

‘The Colonel has no imagination.’ Curt stared up at the brilliant Moon. ‘Sometimes a man just has to get off somewhere by himself. Sometimes he just can’t stand people fussing around him.’ He looked at the thin man. ‘Can you understand what I mean?’

‘I understand.’ Comain thinned his lips as he nodded, then, taking one hand from the wheel, pointed ahead. ‘There she is!’

Light blazed before them. Light and the delicate tracery of a high wire fence. The squat bulk of a tracking station loomed on their left, the white and red warning notices ringing the area showed stark on their right, and before them …

It towered like the delicate spire from some ancient dream. Smooth, glistening with streamlined perfection, needle-pointed and resting on its wide fins. Loading platforms and gantries clustered around it, but even their bulk couldn’t hide the sheer beauty of the man-made thing resting in the centre of the area. It seemed to hover on the levelled sand, like a thing without weight or substance. It soared towards the beckoning stars and the lights ringing the area shimmered in scintillating ripples from the gleaming hull.

A space ship.

Curt stared at it as he had stared at it a million times in imagination and in reality. For him it was the final realisation of ambition, the solid proof that he was not living in a dream. Before him rose the space ship, real, solid, fact. A dream made tangible, a thing of ten thousand hopes and eternal longing from countless men crystallised into something that should finally reach for the stars.

And he was its pilot.

Guards stepped forward as the jeep droned towards the high wire fence and Comain grunted as his foot moved from accelerator to brake. Lights blazed at him, forcing him to squint and shield his weak eyes, then, recognised by the guards, they droned into the wired area and towards the low bulk of the living quarters.

‘Better go straight to bed if you want to dodge the Colonel,’ he suggested. ‘Anyway, you could do with some sleep.’

‘I can’t sleep.’ Curt twisted in his seat as he stared at the towering space ship. ‘Man! How can I sleep? This is it, Comain! This is what I’ve wanted all my life! I blast at dawn and you talk of sleep!’

‘Dawn?’ The thin man frowned as he glanced at his left wrist. ‘In four hours?’

‘Is it?’ Curt shrugged. ‘I’m not wearing a watch. Zero hour is at dawn – that’s all I care about.’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. Walk about perhaps, yarn with the boys, play poker, anything. Don’t you realise that this is my last night on Earth? Tomorrow I’ll be in space, swinging around the Moon, watching the naked stars, feeling what it’s like to be in free fall. I want to enjoy all this while I can. I’ve no time for sleep.’

‘Don’t talk like that, Curt.’ Comain swallowed, then grinned as he brought the jeep to a halt. ‘Don’t talk as if this were your last night alive I mean. You’ll be coming back. You know you will, and when you do, you’ll be a hero. Think of it, Curt. The first man to have circled the Moon! Your name will be in every history book from now on.’

‘Perhaps, but, Comain, it won’t be the same after this. Nothing will. This is all I’ve lived for and once I’ve done it, what then? Can I bear to settle down again? Or will I be altered in some way, sent insane perhaps or my body twisted with the free radiation we know is out there? I may be crippled, or blind. I may be a thing of horror, or even if space doesn’t harm me, I may die in a crash landing, die – or worse. No, Comain, as far as I’m concerned, this is my last night on Earth and I’ll be damned if I waste it in sleep.’

Lithely the slender man swung from his seat then stood, looking down at Comain.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Check the radio gear again I suppose. You know that I’ll be in contact with you all the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be seeing you at dawn then.’ Comain narrowed his eyes as he saw a tall, trimly uniformed figure emerge from one of the low huts. ‘Better watch it if you don’t want to see the Colonel. He’s just left his quarters.’

‘Has he?’ Curt grinned and moved away from the jeep. ‘I can do without his company for now. Be seeing you, Comain.’ He lifted an arm in a casual salute and walked rapidly from the vehicle, the shadows between the glaring arc lights hiding him from view.

Comain nodded, not answering, then, with a strangely bitter expression on his thin features, sat hugging the wheel and staring towards the glistening perfection of the waiting rocket ship. He didn’t answer the Colonel when Adams spoke to him. He didn’t seem to notice the chill wind sweeping from the desert or the fading light of the burning stars. He just sat waiting, his weak eyes clouded with thought and his stooped