The first exploratory expedition to Pluto returns with only one crewman aboard-the Captain, Jules Carmodine. There is a profound mystery as to what has happened to the original crew: Carmodine is suffering from an amnesiac block, and is broken in health-almost insane, and full of self-loathing. Medical treatment restores his health but the amnesia as to what had happened on Pluto remains. Carmodine is then forced to go back on a second expedition to Pluto to exorcise his tortured memories of abandoning his crew. And unless he can remember what happened, the second expedition will fall victim to whatever decimated the first. It is a journey he does not wish to make-a journey into terror!
Release date:
January 30, 2014
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
261
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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Footsteps of Angels (2004) (previously unpublished work written c.1988)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Pandora’s Box (1996) (previously unpublished work written 1954)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Starslave (2010) (previously unpublished work written 1984)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Temple of Death (1996) (previously unpublished work written 1954)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)
The deserter
THEY found him in Crater 4, the festering wound in the heart of the Mato Grosso where the early ships had sprayed the area with radioactives from their dirty atomic exhausts and mutated flora and fauna alike.
The village was a straggle of huts and sheds all sheltering beneath the grotesque trees in a deliberate search for shadow. Even the noon sun did little more than generate a golden haze between rare shafts of penetrating brilliance. It was a place of mystery, disturbing, enigmatic, brooding in the humid silence.
The officer didn’t like it. “How much further?” he demanded. He sounded petulant, irritated at having been selected for this mission.
“Not so far, sir.”
Something moved in the dimness to one side of the path.
“You pay now, please?” The voice sounded as if it came from a lipless mouth.
“When we see him.” The officer didn’t turn to stare at the informer. One glance hack at the edge of the clearing had been enough. “Where is he?”
“In tavern, sir. Always in tavern. You pay me now, please?”
“When we find him.”
He was sprawled across a table in a low-roofed structure set tight against the bole of a tree, a place of knighted dimness and kindly shadow in which distorted figures sat drinking and inhaling plumes of acrid smoke. Around him, on table and floor, rested a litter of empty bottles that had once contained wine.
“God!” whispered one of the guards. “Is that what we’ve come to collect?”
He was filthy. His clothes were of synthetic fibre and could not rot but they were torn, stained, fouled with slime and vomit. His hair and beard were a matted refuge for vermin. He had been a physically big man. He was still big in his degradation. His health was gone, his hope, his pride and self-respect. Only an animal sense of caution remained, an instinctive awareness of danger so that his hand groped for an empty bottle as the guards approached.
“Halt!” The officer stepped ahead of his men. He was young and inclined to be censorious. Distastefully he stared at the ruined hulk. “You there! Wake and listen!”
He opened his eyes. They were crusted with sticky exhudations, bloodshot, yellow with fever, bright with the smouldering fires of madness.
“Doctor Jules Carmodine,” snapped the officer officiously. “You will rise and accompany me.” And then, as the man made no response, “Understand me, Carmodine! You are under arrest on a capital charge! Obey!”
Carmodine threw the bottle into his face.
It hit with a splintering thud, landing where the nose joins the forehead, shattering in a spray of fragments. Even as it left his hand, Carmodine lunged forward, overturning the table as he made for the door. The guards were in the way. He shouldered the officer aside and fought with the insensate fury of a trapped beast, using head, hands, knees, elbows, kicking and biting with all the desperate cunning of an animal and all the reactive skill of ingrained training. Then the heavy butt of a gun slammed against his temple and he could fight no more.
They took him to Brasilia, to the big hospital, the operating theatre and therapy rooms. They cleansed his body and healed his wounds. They gave him deep-sleep and intravenous feeding, freed him of parasites and afflictions, weakness and additions and did what they could for his mind. After a long while, they transferred him to jail, and there, left him alone.
Waiting to stand trial for his life.
The irony of it amused him. He savoured it while lying on the narrow cot, staring at the smooth plastic of the ceiling that was mottled with sunlight by day and the water-reflection of Moon and stars at night. It was part of the crazy illogic of Mankind that they should insist on healing a man before ceremoniously killing him. Curing his ailments, rather, for they hadn’t been able to effect a complete recovery.
Somehow, somewhere, he had lost a part of his life.
He twisted a little on the hard bunk, suddenly impatient of the whole farce. Why keep him here like this? Why go through all the empty formality of a trial? Why not just set him against a wall facing a firing squad and give him swift and final peace?
He moved again, sweating, narrowing his eyes so that the shimmering sunlight reflected on the ceiling broke into a thousand shards of splintered brilliance, each shard winking and flickering with hypnotic insistence.
Remember! Remember! Remember!
“No!” he gasped. “No!”
You will remember, flickered the sunlight. Listen and obey. You will remember everything. Everything!
He shuddered as, from somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, he heard the echoing screams of dying men.
Remember!
Rolling from the bunk, he stood, shuddering, sweat beading his forehead to run over his face. Toilet facilities stood in the corner of the cell. He twisted the faucet, filled the bowl, ducked his head into the water and drenched hair and neck. The water was tepid but it helped. Rising, he shook droplets from his hair, ducked again, kept his face below the surface until his lungs ached from the lack of air.
Remember, he thought. Remember what? Mentally he searched the blank spot in his memory but found nothing.
Then why had he heard the screams of dying men? A dream, he told himself. That’s all it was. A dream. A nightmare that somehow got itself mixed up with something I can’t remember. But why can’t I remember?
He ducked his face again and pulled the lever and watched as the water ran from the bowl. It vanished with a liquid gurgle. Memories, he thought, all gone down the drain like that water. But who pulled the lever on me?
He turned as sounds came from beyond the cell door.
The soft pad of footsteps, a metallic jingle as of keys, a definite click as the lock was operated. The door opened, allowed a man to pass through, closed again.
Carmodine blinked. “You!”
“So you remember me? That is good.” Doctor Paul Brensco stepped closer, walking as a fencer walks, delicately, poised on the balls of his feet and ready to jump at any second.
He was blond, impeccably dressed and with eyes of intense blue. A thin moustache accentuated the sardonic lines of his mouth. He was tall but appeared even taller because of his slimness but there was nothing weak about him; like a rapier he was built for economical strength.
Paul Brensco, scientist-adventurer, Carmodine’s one-time rival.
But not now, he thought tiredly. All that is over. Now he’s the kingpin and he’s way out ahead in a class of his own. Aloud he said, “Have you come to gloat, Paul?”
Brensco shook his head. “No, Jules. Have I anything to gloat about?”
“I should think you have.” Carmodine sat on the edge of a cot, leaving the stool for his visitor. “Or aren’t you human enough to enjoy the sweet taste of victory?”
“All that is past,” said Brensco evenly. “Once, I admit, I hated you. At the Academy when you, with your great, ox-like body, used to be first in athletics, I swore that one day I would best you. Later, when you were given the command of that exploration vessel to Pluto, I could have killed you and enjoyed doing it. But you were a man then. Now…” He shrugged and made no attempt to disguise his contempt. “Crater 4,” he mused. “Mutants, scum, degenerates killing themselves with narcotics, but they have a reason. They were born to suffer. But you? Did you have to join them?”
Carmodine made no answer.
“You’ve proved that you are weak,” continued Brensco. “A man who ran away, who tried to escape into the dream-world of drugs, who mingled with the mutants as if they were his brothers.” He paused. “Brothers and sisters,” he said meaningfully. “Things with too many arms or no arms at all. Creatures with scales instead of skin. Freaks, monsters, hellspawn! And you joined them!”
“Why don’t you spit if you feel like it?” Carmodine spoke without emotion but inwardly he was fighting the automatic tension, the readiness for combat that Brensco could always induce. Like cat and dog, he thought. We have a natural antipathy. A glandular reaction that spawns automatic violence. He forced himself to relax. Now there was no longer any need to fight. “Go ahead,” he invited. “I won’t mind. I don’t care what you do or what you call me. What any man calls me. It doesn’t matter any more.” He smiled without humour. “A dead man is beyond injury.”
“You consider yourself dead?”
“What else? I deserted my command and that is a capital charge. I crashed my ship and failed to report and they could execute me for that alone. I’m dead, Paul. In a little while, I’ll be cremated. It’s just a matter of taking care of the formalities. So why don’t you get the hell out of here and leave me alone!”
He’d been shouting, but it didn’t matter. The smooth plastic lining walls, floor and ceiling absorbed the sound. Only Brensco could have heard and that didn’t matter either. Nothing mattered. It was, as he had said, only a matte. . .
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