Most of the problems were solved in the 29th century. War was a memory. Disease was almost conquered. Old age and Death were held at bay. It was a glad world. A brave new world. Humanity had grown up. And then It came... At first the dare-devil pioneers from the far-flung corners of the universe brought back strange tales of a mountain that walked. The reign of terror spread from planet to planet, until the authorities sat up and took notice. By the time someone with enough initiative to re-open the long disused weapon shops, came on the scene, it was almost too late. Time was against them. Atomic bomb wouldn't smash that creature, neither would heat rays nor energy bolts. It left a train of utter chaos and devastation behind it as it strode imperiously through the galaxy.
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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THERE were three of them aboard the ship. Norge Jansen, big, fair, and as Norwegian as his name. As far as they had a skipper, Norge did the job. Then there was Paul Whiteland, as different from Jansen as chalk from cheese. Which of them you preferred depended on which type of character you preferred—chalk or cheese. They are both useful in their own way. You can’t write on a blackboard with a lump of Cheddar. You can’t satisfy your appetite with three sticks of coloured writing apparatus.
It was difficult to like Norge Jansen and Paul Whiteland. They didn’t go together, but they were together. Whiteland was small, dark, tough as whipcord. And cynical. Deadly cynical. Cheesed off with everything. His eyes flashed cynicism. It dripped from his finger tips, and darted like snake venom from his tongue. Ritz MacQueen came somewhere between the two—if it was possible to imagine a compromise between two such uncompromising characters.
MacQueen was slightly lugubrious, but not sufficiently so to be a bore or a nuisance. He was intelligent enough not to be credulous, and interested enough in life not to be cynical. They looked for all the world like the famous advert about growing up on somebody or other’s cocoa. Or somebody else’s shaving lotion, ‘not too little and not too much—but just right!’ Norge Jansen was one extreme, Paul Whiteland was the other, as far as personalities went. Ritz was the ‘just right,’ like the washing powder adverts. Ritz MacQueen was the stuff that gave you pure white shirts and bright coloureds. The other two fellows were product X that didn’t do so good, and left hidden dirt in, and all that sort of thing.
And yet, somehow, funnily enough, these three had got together. One thing had got them together more than anything else. The common denominator that overruled all the differences and discrepancies. The common denominator was boredom—sheer, stark boredom.
The world of the 29th century was a singularly boring place in which to live. It was a world of almost unbelievable plenty, and nearly all economic problems had been solved. More than that. Most of the problems of any kind were solved. War was just a memory, disease was almost conquered, old age and death were held at bay.
It was a glad world, a brave new world, not a brave new world in a cynical sense, but really brave, really new. Humanity at last had grown up! There was peace and prosperity, and above all, the one thing that men had wanted most—security. Perhaps more of security than of anything else. People didn’t get sick any more, people didn’t have accidents any more. Trains didn’t crash, rockets got to their destination on time with the ease of a well-oiled mechanism. There was no ‘chance’ to be found anywhere. Risk had been eliminated. It had been hunted down like a ruthless enemy, and now there was no more risk. For nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand that was just fine, that was how they wanted the world to be. They didn’t want risk, they didn’t want to get their dear little namby-pamby feet wet. Old ladies of both sexes were delighted with the soft, sweet world they had conjured up. And in many, many ways they had justification on their side. They had a right to be proud of the way they had made poverty, and race- and class-distinction disappear. These things were good … but they had no right to be proud of the instances—rare though they were—of the instances in which they had been overdone. And somewhere the precious bird of Freedom had been caged. …
Somehow security had become a kind of obsession. That was where the trouble had come in. Everything was so conditioned, clarified, checked and double-checked, that even if a man wanted to take a risk he just didn’t get the chance.
The employment bureau, for example, were so fantastically efficient that no one ever had to take a chance on his job. A thousand and one little psychological tests made quite certain that the square pegs went into the rectangular holes, and the round pegs went into the circular ones. There were no social misfits any more … and yet there were. There were in a different kind of way. For the great pains the sociologists had taken to avoid the possibilities of social misfits, there were men who wanted the right to be misfits. There were men who didn’t want to know in advance that they were going to do well in a job that had been chosen for them. There were men who didn’t want to be completely on top of their daily work; there were men who didn’t want to go through life without a single worry. Sure, nobody wants to grind himself to ulcers, nobody wants to work sixteen hours a day in the wrong job. Nobody wants to sweat blood instead of water, just because there’s a labour abundance. Nobody wants to go back to the days when men were singing, ‘Buddy, can you spare a dime?’ and picking stones into buckets for two shillings a day. Sure, nobody wanted that, but at the same time, there were limits.
It would have been nice to know that just somewhere the lavender-and-old-lace armour of grandmother security didn’t reach. … If there could be just one dangerous little corner of the universe left. Just somewhere that a man could fly a ship and not know that everything would be protected and civilised and orderly. Somewhere where the countryside wouldn’t look like one succession of park after park. Somewhere where jungles grew wild, and free, and strange beasts raced through them, while violently coloured birds screeched and called overhead. Paul Whiteland, Norge Jansen and Ritz MacQueen were out after adventure. They were tired of country-like parks. They were tired of a world that was safe and dull. They were tired of ‘decency’ and order. They were rebels without a cause, maybe, and yet there was a certain quality about their restlessness which appealed to something deep down in the hunting heart of every man.
Norge and Paul and Ritz wanted to go off into the great unknown, wanted to shake off the shackles of security and ease and comfort. Wanted to go out into the wilds—if there were any wilds left. So they were prospecting. Not for money—for, in the organised set-up of the 29th century, no one had any need of money. The living standard had been fixed so high that it supplied far more than the basic wants of any human being. The social security arrangements were perfect. The welfare state had grown and expanded to the point where anybody could have pretty well anything if he just proved that he wanted it badly enough. That in itself was not a bad thing. It just meant that one more reason had been taken away from men like Norge and Paul and Ritz, who wanted to go out into space for no reason. If it hadn’t been for the welfare state they could have said that they were going to make a fortune because they wanted money. When every man has got a millionaire’s living standards, nobody wants money any more—there’s no point in it.
They just wanted to prospect for adventure. They wanted to find a planet somewhere. A tiny remote system where the earth empire and its security had not spread. They wanted a world that they could live and breathe in, and know that there were other things living and breathing—things perhaps not friendly, things which might even be dangerous. They wanted above all the right to run risks and make decisions for themselves. In a world where everything else was supplied, it seemed strange, idiotic, obscure, to want such an illusory thing, and yet they felt it was vitally important.
That was what they were doing out on the rim of the galaxy. Three men in a supervidic exploratory craft, trying to find a planet where the economists had not already been. Trying to find a world that somebody else had not tamed. A world where they could live as pioneers. In a world of secure planets it was a crazy thing to want, and in that sense, Jansen, Whiteland and MacQueen were crazy … but it was a nice kind of craziness.
A blip suddenly showed up on the screen. A tiny blip, not a planet blip, not even a space ship blip. It was not big enough for either.
“What the devil’s that?” queried Ritz. Paul’s dark, piercing little eyes snapped up towards the screen like two hungry flies settling on a rotten fruit.
“Life rocket,” he said between his teeth. “Life rocket without power. I’ll lay you twenty international credits on it.”
“What’s the point of betting credits out here? Who wants credits, anyway?” said George.
“No—you’re right there! What’s the good of money? You could have a suitcase full, and burn it in a furnace, then go and apply for some more because you wanted it. Ah, sometimes it makes me sick! It’s stuff you gotta have, it’s like air, but it’s taken all the kick out of life.”
“Now there’s a point, you know. If we had to fight for the very air we wanted to breathe; if there was only enough air for nine men and ten men wanted it. There’d be some point.”
“I can give you more point than that,” said Ritz MacQueen. “How about enough air for one man—and ten men wanted it?”
“That’s going too far! The survivor would be too badly mussed up to breathe it when he got it!”
“Why don’t you guys q. . .
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