Baker Amazing Tales Volume 118

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-98744-711-2
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 99 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Welcome to Amazing Tales Volume 118, a captivating anthology that delves into the realms of cosmic adventure, human resilience, and enigmatic mysteries. This collection brings together six enthralling stories, each weaving its own unique tapestry of imagination and intrigue. Begin your journey with Treasure of Triton, where an elusive chase unfolds across an alien world. The Space Patrol's pursuit of Wolf Larsen becomes a high-stakes game, with creation's richest prize and a perilous path to freedom. This story immerses you in a landscape of glittering treasures and ancient secrets. Next, venture to the harsh planet of Tetrarch IV in Against Tetrarch by A. A. O. Gilmour. Here, Rod Harrow fights not just for survival in the mines, but against a ticking clock and the shadows of betrayal. His quest for vengeance amid despair is a gripping race against time. In The Sword of Johnny Damokles by Hugh Frazier Parker, peace across worlds hangs by a thread as a dictator's ambitions threaten to ignite chaos. On Neptune, prisoners Timmy Gordon and Johnny Damokles are unwitting players in a deadly game, tasked with constructing a devastating weapon. William Tenn's Ricardo's Virus takes us to the unforgiving jungles of Venus. When a knife wound spirals into a life-or-death mystery, Graff Dingle must outwit a relentless mold to save lives, battling both the elements and time. Hannes Bok's Stranger From Space transports us to Venus, where Koroby's longing for adventure meets a startling reality. As a mysterious visitor arrives, her dreams of romance are tested, leading her through a journey of cosmic wonder and unforeseen truths. Finally, Murderer's Base by William Brittain spins a tense tale of treachery and survival on a lonely asteroid. In a deadly game of cat and mouse, Joe Berne's plot to eliminate his partner Sam Hervey unfolds against the backdrop of space's vast emptiness. Dive into Amazing Tales Volume 118, where each story promises to captivate your ima...

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baker, Charles A.

Leseproben

Treasure of Triton

The Space Patrol and the terrible guards of
Triton pursued Wolf Larsen. But the black pirate
had two aces in the hole—creation's richest
prize, and a ray-death route to freedom.

Triton was a dead world. The hydrogen snow that covered the illimitable desolation of the plain glowed a weird green in the dying Neptune-light. Above it, grim and black, towered the west wall of the great Temple of Triton. The evening gale had drifted the snow high against its east wall, but here, in its lee, the ground was bare. The faint light struck sparks of color from the gravel, the stones, the boulders—gravel that was ruby and sapphire, stones that were giant moissonites, boulders that were titanic diamonds. The Wolf Cub rested on that gravel, its beryllium sides a sickly green. In all that world, only Wolf Larsen lived and moved and breathed.

An alien might have correctly supposed that this world had been dead for untold ages, that the builders of its Temple had perished incalculably long ago, that nothing would ever live here again. Wolf Larsen knew better. In a few hours, it would be dawn, and the strange life of Triton would revive. That was the reason for his haste.

The job had taken longer than he had expected. The Temple was built of cyclopean blocks of bort—black diamond, the hardest of all substances. The life-span of a Tritonian is ten times that of a human, but no one would ever know how many generations it had taken the Tritonians, with their primitive technique, to hew those innumerable blocks. Nor did the Tritonians themselves know for how long they had worshiped at that fane. Most authorities agreed that it must have been old before the Pyramids of Egypt were begun.

The Temple was windowless, and had only one door, some six feet square. Set in the middle of the west face, it was hewn from a single gigantic block of bort. With that door, Larsen had been struggling ever since the evening gale died down. It had proved harder to blast a hole through the bort than he had anticipated. And its thickness had amazed him. He had been unable to get at its lock; if, indeed, it had a lock. In fact, he might as well have tried to blast through the wall itself.

Triton, Neptune's moon, keeps one face always turned toward that planet, and the Temple was built directly beneath it. While Larsen toiled, the slender crescent of the primary had broadened to the full, ten times brighter than earth's moon, and now was dwindling once more. Larsen had not slept for over sixty hours; and despite his vacuum-walled, electrically heated space-suit, he was chilled to the bone, his hands numbed with a cold but a few degrees above absolute zero.

Not in twenty years in the mines of Mercury had he toiled as he had done in those sixty hours. First, he had burned holes in the bort. Then he had filled them with cartridges of the fine hydrogen snow, intimately mixed with solid oxygen pulverized equally fine. Finally he had exploded the mixture with a micro-wave, and cleared out the shattered bort. Where the tough stuff had merely crackled, he had pried it out with a crowbar, until the bar, brittle with cold, had snapped short. But now the worst of his task was finished. At long last, he had holed through the door.

Larsen emerged from the Wolf Cub carrying his oxy-hydrogen cutting torch, a heavy load even in the light gravity of Triton. A star of blue light flared from it, and snowflakes dropped from the star, as the products of its combustion condensed in the cold. If he once extinguished that torch, its fuel would freeze solid, and there would be no lighting it again.

For all his weariness, and for all the cold, a fierce exultation fired him. His long planning, his months-long voyage through the void, were about to bring fruit. The most priceless jewel in the solar system was within his grasp.

Larsen had done many things for jewels. He had violated every law of every world. He had killed more men than he himself could remember. He had stolen meteoric diamonds from Mars, and rubies from Ganymede; emeralds from Titan, and priceless moissonites from Oberon. And these he had hidden well on a nameless asteroid, and they could stay there till the end of time for all Larsen, or anyone else, cared.

By the time the Interplanetary Patrol caught up with him, and he served a twenty-year term in the mines of Mercury, the spacemen had reached Triton. And there they had found rubies and emeralds, diamonds and moissonites and every gemstone known in the solar system, as common as clay or lime on earth, and Larsen's carefully hidden jewels were worth as much as so many pebbles.

At first, Larsen had come very near to killing himself, when he learned that. But a scheme had come to him. There was the Eye of Triton, the great stone which people of Neptune's moon had worshiped for untold Neptunian ages. It was clearly unique on Triton, where all other gems were so abundant. It must be unique in the system; certainly in its historical value. What value the Tritonians themselves set on it could be judged from the immense strength of the Temple they had built to guard it. Tradition held that the Eye had dropped from the heavens; a meteor, perhaps torn from the heart of Neptune; perhaps from another system. Few humans had ever seen it, and those only from a distance, and in the worst of lights. But they agreed that it was transparent white, like a diamond. Moreover, it was set as the eye of a life-sized statue of a Tritonian—and the eye of a Tritonian is upwards of five inches in diameter.

A certain plutocrat of Cyrene had offered Larsen a cool million for the Eye, even if it turned out to be nothing but a diamond. For a million, you could buy everything that Cyrene had to offer and Cyrene, the pleasure-dome on the far side of earth's moon, offered every pleasure and every luxury that mankind had ever developed. Men could prolong their lives, and their vigor, indefinitely nowadays if they could afford to pay for all the resources of modern medicine. Best of all, the I.P.P. had no jurisdiction in Cyrene, and the local authorities never bothered any resident of the little planet provided he was supplied with money enough.

It would be doubly pleasant to win such a fortune at the expense of the Tritonians. To be sure, they had never been known to harm anyone. But it was precisely such inoffensive beings that Larsen loathed and despised most bitterly. Besides, he blamed them for the discovery of the gems which had made his own valueless.

In any case, he had gone too far to back down now. Landing on Triton without a license, as he had done, was itself a violation of Interplanetary Law. Attempted violation of a Tritonian temple was a serious offense. If the Patrol caught him, he would spend the rest of his life in the mines of Mercury. And they would be sure to catch him if he failed to get the Eye.

It wasn't like the good old days, when an outlaw could always keep a million miles ahead of the Patrol. Now every port where he might obtain supplies was too closely watched. Only Cyrene offered a place of refuge, and there only to a man with plenty of money. Larsen smiled grimly. Whatever happened, he was not going back to the mines. There was always one very sure way of cheating the law!

He pushed the torch ahead of him through the hole, cautiously. Its exhaust condensed to ice on the cold bort. A few projections of the bort barred his way. Larsen turned up the torch, directed it on them. The bort glowed yellow in the fierce heat, as the pure carbon burned, which condensed to dry ice on his space-suit.

When those obstructions were gone, Larsen crawled past into the Temple, and stood up. A thin powder of snow covered everything. The bluish glare of the torch, reflected from it, suggested but faintly the vastness of the place. Before him crouched a monstrous figure, human sized, but lobster shaped, its head enormous, its dozen legs many jointed. Many similar figures lay on the floor, as stiffly motionless, each grasping a massive double-headed ax.

Larsen had to turn up his torch before he could be sure that the crouching figure was indeed the idol he sought, and those others its guardian priests, frozen in the death-like sleep of their kind. Not till dawn could anything awaken them. Dawn, he knew, could not be far off. But he reckoned that it would take some time for its reviving warmth to penetrate the immense thickness of those walls.

Cautiously, he wiped the snow off the single enormous eye that occupied the center of the idol's forehead. The eye flashed fire at him; blue-white, transparent, lustrous as a diamond. It had been cut, diamond fashion, in many facets, to resemble the many-lensed, insect-like eyes of the Tritonians themselves. The eye was set in a band of cement. Larsen tested that cement with a chisel. He cursed. It was almost as hard as the bort from which the idol had been hewn. He dared take no chances on scratching the Eye. He turned on his torch full blast, and began to cut into the bort around the cement, careful to keep the flame away from the Eye. Sudden heating might crack that mysterious stone.

Larsen worked feverishly, forgetful of time, sweating despite the chill, until he felt a draught on his back; a cold that bit through his space-suit to his very marrow. Snowflakes were swirling around him. The dawn-wind, blowing through the hole in the door! On Triton, the hydrogen atmosphere froze every night.

From either side, winds rushed in to fill the vacuum, but themselves froze before they had gone far.

The Eye seemed loose in its socket. Larsen turned down the torch. Cautiously, he grasped the cement. The Eye came away in his hand. He was used, by now, to the low gravity of Triton, but the lightness of the stone surprised him. It...