Salford is chosen to visit a long dead planet outside the solar system. However, when he gets out of the ship for a look around, he has the distinct feeling he is not alone.
Release date:
April 30, 2015
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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HARRY SALFORD was a slightly taller than average man. He hadn’t got the kind of height that made him stand out in a crowd, but neither was he often in difficulty when he wanted to look over the heads of a crowd. Salford didn’t look his height, for he was well-built with it. He was by no means an old man, neither was he particularly young. He was as much past middle age in years as he was above average height in inches. His hair was still dark rather than grey, his eyes were clear, and the superb muscles of his powerful body were in their prime. He hadn’t quite the wind that had been his twenty years before, but there was a toughness and a stamina about Harry Salford which had come with maturity and which seemed—as far as he was concerned—to compensate for those mild inroads which age had made. He sat now in a comfortable, tubular steel chair looking at a 3-D presentation on his video-screen. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the sort of thing which would be a tremendous sacrifice to interrupt.
Harry reached out his left hand and picked up a plastic sibo container. He poured himself half a glass of his favourite alcoholic concoction and knocked it back with a swift, virile, masculine gesture. He supposed that by the health-less standards of the 19th and 20th centuries of long ago and far away, the alcoholic content of sibo would be a very tame and mild one. He shuddered sometimes as he thought about the 20th century. People had actually smoked then, he thought. It was beyond his understanding, but the historians said there was no doubt of it, and the historians must be right.
He set the ‘glass’ down and his attention was focused once more on the play that was being enacted before him. He couldn’t get interested in either the hero or the villain. They seemed too cut-and-dried by his standards. The hero was as pure and clean as a recently whitewashed wall. The villain was a purposeless, motiveless sort of villain. He was a jet-black, pure jade, died-in-the-wool Jasper from the dark blue Yonder. He wasn’t exactly wearing an Edwardian-type hat, or twirling a black moustache, but his actions were as predictable as those of the true Edwardian anti-hero. The heroine, too, was stereotyped. Maybe that was the trouble with the video presentations. Everything had been stereotyped for so long. Of course, there must be a certain amount of sympathy with producers and writers who said that all the best plots had been used already. Maybe that was so. Maybe they had. Men had been writing films, novels and scenarios for a long time. Harry laughed a little to himself. He wondered for how long writers had been complaining that all the best plots had been used already. Maybe as long ago as the 20th century they thought they’d done it all? Maybe even before that. Maybe when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales, at the end of the 14th century, he was bemoaning the fact that all the best stories had already been told? Maybe Shakespeare, and Kidd, Kit Marlowe, Fielding, Walter Scott, Dickens, Conrad, and the others had all felt the same thing? He wondered why this was. He found that his attention was now only half-focused on the screen. There was a break for an advertisement. An announcer appeared, decked out in space helmet and a rather romanticised astrogational outfit. Harry Salford grinned a little. He wondered if that particular announcer had ever blasted very far from his home world. He didn’t look as if he had.
“Now folks,” said the announcer, in a kind of pseudo-Earth accent, which Salford found particularly annoying. Being of genuine Earth-stock, Salford found that pseudo-terrestrial accents really irritated him. It was like running into a man wearing a cheap impersonation of a school tie to which he was not entitled. It was like coming across a man who sported the galactic medal, when you knew damn well he’d never been near a conflict. It was irritating. Very. Salford poured himself another drink, and tried not to hear what the announcer was saying.
But the advertisers had chosen their man well. He had the kind of voice it was impossible to ignore.
“A new Asterlink, Mark 8, is the rocket ship for you. Buy or Charter now! Asterlink, Galactic Astrogational Exports Limited offer you unlimited credit facilities for this superb new ship. Contact your local sales agent.”
The penetrating voice drew Salford’s eyes unwillingly back in the direction of the screen. The new Asterlink Mark 8, had been photographed skilfully from just the right direction, from just the right aspect to give it an immaculate appearance. They had got some clever camera shots which showed it bigger than it actually was.
“With this ship,” went on the announcer, “you can have that extra-galactic feeling. Fitted with the latest Warp gear and re-entry control units, you won’t know whether you’re riding the spaceways, or sitting at home in your own armchair.”
This time Salford laughed out loud. Maybe the man would say anything if they paid him, but an armchair in front of the video screen was one thing, Space was another.
In a thousand years of astrogation, men had come a long, long way. Since the first sputnik to orbit around distant Earth, progress had been phenomenal. Even the most clear sighted and imaginative of the pioneers could not really have embraced a picture of the galactic empire which had emerged since the first manned expedition had broken away from the solar system. Salford was something of an amateur historian. Most spacemen were. Men who have spent years of their lives dipping into the void and gliding out again at some remote point, like the concrete reality of history as a mental discipline. It gives a sense of belonging. It helps you to realise that you have a planet of your own. If you were an Earthman, as Salford could proudly claim for himself, then you had a long and one of the most interesting and intricate histories of any intelligent race in the galaxy.
The advertiser finally finished, leaving Salford with the distinct impression that he would have liked to purchase one of the new Asterlink Mark 8’s.
The hero and villain were now face to face in the video screen melodrama. Salford poured himself another drink and wondered why the hero didn’t shoot the man straight through the stomach when he had the chance.
Perhaps, thought Salford, he was an old fashioned, chivalrous hero. The spaceman raised one eyebrow quizzically as he watched hero and villain circling each other like a cat playing with a mouse—each apparently believing that he was the cat!
Salford looked at the hero thoughtfully. His analysis lifted his mind again from the immediate impact of the plot itself. That hero, he thought, so fresh faced, and that mass of crinkly fair hair that made him look like a Norse god … the hero had the sort of look that a man like Salford associated with Balder the Beautiful. He was rather a pretty sort of hero. There was nothing in the least mature or rugged about him. He was a kind of teen-age hero. Salford wondered how such a man in real life would have been capable of standing up to the rigours of deep space. Not very well, in Salford’s opinion. The hero didn’t look the type. Salford looked at him again, rather puzzled, bewildered. That boyish figure reminded him of somebody … or som. . .
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