The Planet Seekers

by Lee Barton, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera; Fantasy; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

A strange new race of modified men had fantastic powers and a kind of immortality. But something the human touch itself had been lost, and in consequence a terrible barrier grew. It looked as if a cataclysmic war would be inevitable.

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

ANGELA MUNRO lifted the envelope from the synthoplastic mat immediately inside the front door of her flat and looked at it with a certain ill-concealed excitement. The stamp with its wavy line postmark was something of a tradition. The British Post Office was an old institution, 600 years old very nearly, thought Angela. She looked at the beautifully engraved head of King George the Twelfth on the stamp. These preliminaries were a kind of tincture for her nerves, which screamed silently inside her body as a result of the excitement that she felt. The excitement was becoming a kind of disease; she had to cure it; the envelope would cure it one way or the other. She tore it open. Angela was quick and vivacious; she had jet black hair, bright intelligent black eyes that looked out with interest from a pert face. She was pretty rather than beautiful in the classic sense.

Angela extracted the single sheet of electro-typed paper, her eyes could scarcely read the words, she was seeing letters rather than words and the letters were dancing and jumping in front of her mind. At last she got sufficient control of herself to make the letter into coherent sense. Subject to a final scrutiny she had won the competition. A fortnight of almost unendurable anticipation subsided—she had won.

She picked up an umbrella, an ornamental electronic auto-opener that stood gay, decorative, very modern and very much mid-Twenty-fifth Century. She danced with the umbrella—a wild waltz, a fantastic fandango—the dance ended in front of her communicator unit. Angela put the umbrella down under the communicator and pressed the call button. She just had to ring the Company and make sure.

The dial trembled a little under the excited pressure of her fingers as she spun the company’s number. The grey opaque panel of her communicator unit went translucent and then transparent, a face appeared.

“Consolidated Detergents,” said the voice belonging to the face.

“Can you put me on to the competition department please?” Angela Munro’s voice rippled with excitement.

“I’m sorry, Madam, I didn’t quite hear what you said.”

“That was my fault,” smiled Angela. “I’m talking so quickly. Can you put me on to the competition department.” She spoke very slowly and clearly this time. The Detergent Company clerk at the other end smiled a little.

“Certainly, Madam,” he said.

Angela held up her letter excitedly as the image faded, to be replaced by the image of another member of the Consolidated Detergent staff.

“I just can’t believe it’s true,” said Angela suddenly. The competition clerk looked at the letter she was waving excitedly.

“I’m glad to tell you, Miss Munro, that it is absolutely true.”

“How did you know who I was?” said Angela.

“Shall we say that I guessed by your general excitement that you must be the lady to whom I had despatched the announcement of the competition result,” said the clerk. “When would you like to take your trip, Madam?”

“Oh I suppose I could go any time; I’ll have to call my boss, of course, and lots of other things, but I can get ready for the next flight. Is it at the end of the week?”

“There is a flight at the end of the week, Madam, and’ if you wish to go then, the Company would be very glad to arrange it for you.”

“I’ll call my boss first and then let you know back. And thank you ever so much!”

Angela switched off with a hand that was trembling more than it had done when she had started. She called the typing pool and explained in short, staccato sentences, punctuated by giggles and bursts of excited laughter, that she had won the Consolidated Detergent Free Holiday competition. The Typing Pool Supervisor checked the roster.

“You can have next week off with pleasure, Angela,” she said. “I’m so glad you have won; it is most exciting. We shall all look forward to hearing about it when you get back.”

“Thank you, Miss Gibbons,” said Angela. The typing pool supervisor could on occasions be something of a martinet, but now she was simpering like a Victorian spinster of six centuries ago. No doubt, thought Angela, when she returned, her fellow electro-key tappers in the pool would get a certain vicarious pleasure from hearing about her second-hand adventure. Venus, she thought to herself as she looked at the letter again. “I’ve won a trip to Venus.” She said it out loud. She thought of the fabulous pleasure dome and almost fainted from sheer excitement and anticipation. It was exotic, romantic, indescribable; she was going on a holiday to Venus—to the Pleasure dome, playground of the richest and most glamorous men and women in the solar system. She—Angela Munro—was going to the great Venusian Pleasure-dome. How many times she repeated the word she did not know. At last it began to dawn on her consciousness; it began to sink through to that deeper level of being at which human mind realizes things as opposed to simply knowing them.

Angela called the Detergent Company again and then started ringing round to all her friends. It took a long time and the more people she called the more she bubbled with excitement as she imparted her news. Finally she was packed and ready to go through the embarkation formalities. A guide from the Detergent Company called for her in a gleaming black and chromium-plated hovercraft. It skimmed between the tall buildings of the London suburbs and flew swiftly and unerringly towards the great Spaceport at Reading. Angela looked at the buildings towering up to the sky, thinking that soon she would be flying far higher than the buildings. She would be flying right out of the atmosphere to Venus. It was still like a magic word—the holiday of a lifetime, the holiday every girl dreamed of.

The Hovercraft reached the edge of the spaceport; Angela had thought that she would never get there; the week that had elapsed since the arrival of the Detergent Company’s competition letter had seemed the longest that she had ever known and it was as though her lifetime, as she remembered it, had been magnified a thousandfold and compressed into that week. And yet, in another way, the week had gone very quickly, she had lived through it in a kind of haze—a sort of dream, a type of trance—there had been a strangely unreal quality about the waiting period. Now, she told herself, the waiting period was over.

She looked at the spaceport, a great diamond-shaped area with tall, needle-like ships standing like patient thoroughbreds waiting for starter’s orders. Angela was peering through the windows of the powerful Hovercraft as the Detergent Company man drove her skilfully to the embarkation building. She alighted and was given a V.I.P. treatment by the spaceport staff and then she found herself walking across the reinforced concrete of the spaceport itself and enjoying the firm smooth sensation of the runway beneath her feet. The Venus rocket loomed above her, tall, powerful, like the hand of a silver giant that could lift up the sky. Angela Munro patted her tight black curls a little nervously as the wind swept towards her across the runway. The runways, she thought, were old, far older than the rockets which blasted off now from the great pads. Some of the runways dated back to the 20th and 21st centuries, she wondered what life must have been like then. The thought passed, swept aside in the general confusion of excited thoughts that were filling the girl’s mind. A smiling stewardess in a smart, shimmering grey, metallic tunic was checking off names on a list. Angela Munro joined the queue of passengers listening excitedly to the names of those who were going to share the voyage with her.

Right at the head of the queue she saw a number of mods and heard them giving their names to the stewardess with a rather cold inhuman detachment. “Azak.”

“Berog.”

“Cuclos.”

“Dyxi.”

“Ergat.”

The stewardess ticked off the names as the mods spoke. They looked so much alike, Angela shivered; she didn’t like mods very much. They didn’t exactly frighten her; Angela Munro wasn’t the kind of girl to be frightened by anything; they gave her a nasty, uneasy feeling. Ergat, the last of them, turned and looked searchingly at the ordinary passengers. What was it that she had once heard mods call people like herself—norms! She would far rather be a norm than a mod any time, and yet some of the mods considered themselves so superior. It was funny, they looked horrible, she thought, with their strangely angular physiques and those awful wires which trailed down just behind their ears. After the last of the five mods had boarded the “Magnetique,” as she saw the spaceship was called, the men ahead of her began moving up the ramp. She listened to the names. Symon Chase was a tall, rather foppish looking playboy type with a face that was pretty rather than handsome and a crop of rather effeminate fair curls. Chaytor Hudson smiled at his stewardess, gave his name as a formality and looked rather a debonair buccaneer of a Space Captain as he climbed on board his own ship. The way the stewardess looked after his retreating shoulders was not lost on Angela Munro’s keen feminine eyes; there was no doubt that in an earlier generation Chaytor Hudson would have been something of a heart throb.

The next man was Philip Hatchworth, unless Angela Munro had misheard. She looked at Philip with interest. There was nothing romantic about him in the least, but he looked as if he might be a fascinating person to know. He was short, fat and bald and possessed a head that was disproportionate to his body. He looked as though he might be a frightful intellectual, she thought. He was the kind of man who appeared to be almost terrifyingly intelligent. The fourth man gave his name as Dover Cross. He was stocky and wore his hair in a grey crew-cut. He looked for all the world like a Uranium prospector.

Angela went up the ramp, gave her name to the stewardess and flashed her ticket nervously. The stewardess smiled and explained where she was to sit on board the rocket. There were two girls coming up the ramp immediately behind Angela. She heard the first give her name as Janet Russell. Janet was tall and languid looking, with blue-dyed hair and an over-sophisticated expression. The second girl looked studious; she was muscularly plump and dressed almost frumpishly, but her eyes were quick and bright and she looked to Angela as though she might be a female version of the man who had called himself Hatchworth.

Angela had halted at the top of the ramp just inside the doorway, near her seat. She realized she ought not to call it a doorway, it was a hatch or a lock or something technical, never mind, she would learn before the voyage was over. She heard the strong, plump, studious-looking girl give her name as Sabine Church. Angela looked at Sabine’s hair rather critically; it was a brilliant green and it contrasted strongly with the languid sophisticated tresses of Janet Russell. Angela wondered whether everybody was now on board and then she saw another girl approaching across the runway. There was nothing particularly outstanding about the girl who was coming now, she had pleasantly normal undyed red hair and was smart and attractive in a practical way, thought Angela. She might never have found her way on to the covers of the glossy magazines. In fact, she was the kind of girl who might have passed very easily in a crowd without attracting a second glance. Angela summed her up as almost distressingly normal.

The stewardess folded her check sheets and began to ascend the ramp. Angela scurried through the metallic interior of the ship in search of the seat which the stewardess had assigned her. She reached it and found that she was sitting immediately between Dover Cross and the languid blue-haired Janet Russell. She smiled a little nervously at the blue-haired girl who acknowledged it with a rather superior nod. Dower Cross smiled in a much more friendly way; there was a rugged, mature look on the supposed prospector’s craggy face. Looking at him, Angela decided that he must be a prospector. He had the eyes of a man who looked out into wide open spaces and the craggy, pleasantly ugly face of an outdoor adventurer. She didn’t think that Janet Russell would be a very interesting, or pleasant companion. She wondered whether if she began talking, Dover Cross would think she was some silly over-garrulous young woman; she didn’t want to put him off at the beginning. Dover Cross looked as though he might be one of those strong, silent men who appreciated quiet girls, so Angela contented herself with another smile. She looked all around her, waiting for the ship to blast off and wondering what would happen next, trying to imagine the kind of procedure that they would have to go through before the ship was space-borne. The stewardess was giving orders calmly and quietly.

“You will find a small red lever immediately to the right of your seats; if you move that lever very slowly away from you your seats will tip back. Pull the lever towards you and the seats will return to the upright position. Would you just try that please?”

Obediently Angela and the others began experimenting with the little red lever. Angela soon found the ideal speed at which to move it; it was surprisingly easy she thought.

“We shall be taking off in a few moments,” said the stewardess, “so please put your chairs back as far as they will go.” Angela watched while Dover Cross and Janet Russell moved their levers, then she pulled her own lever back and found herself lying very comfortably looking up at the ceiling of the cabin.

“The safety clamps will come into operation if you press the green button at the end of your red lever,” said the stewardess. Obediently Angela and the other passengers pressed their buttons. Slowly and very gently, adjusting themselves automatically to the contours of the passengers’ bodies, a number of safety clamps wriggled their way out of the seats like a crowd of tame metallic worms. Angela felt just a little frightened, movement was severely restricted within the clamps and she had a horror of being held motionless; she felt a kind of suffocating claustrophobia in the grip of the clamps. The stewardess disappeared from her field of vision. A voice came over the loudspeaker—the ship’s public address system.

“This is Captain Chaytor Hudson speaking. You will see the Sidereal Chron on the ceiling of your cabin; it will light up as we start the count-down. When you see the Chron light up you will know exactly how long it will be before we take off.”

Angela watched with the happy excitement of a schoolgirl as the cabin ceiling illuminated itself suddenly in the outline of a clock face with pointers. The pointers began to move towards zero. As she studied it more closely Angela realized it was by no means the type of clock with which sh. . .