Anderson by P6-Starship

Author:P6-Starship [P6-Starship]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Although Davis caused a small war, the benefits of his incursion far outweighed the drawbacks. For bringing Minos into the Stellar Union, history reveres him as a hero.

The same cannot be said of every outside visitor to a primitive world, Interstellar crime did not exist in the days of STL travel, but hyperdrive opened the starlanes to brigands of every sort. Yet those who would profit from the ignorance of others never consider the penalties for ignorance in themselves.

Teucan

Sometimes a nuclear-conversion engine develops an ulcer. The containing fields weaken long enough—a few microseconds, perhaps for the machine to start devouring itself. It doesn’t happen often, but neither is it unheard of, and it will continue to happen until somebody abolishes the Uncertainty Principle. In the event of an ulcer, the only thing to do is to get out of the neighbor-hood—fast.

Weber considered himself lucky to be near a planet when his engine broke loose. He had, in fact, been coming in for a landing, and it was a moment’s scrambling to get into a spacesuit. He grabbed for the chest where he kept his weapons, and a blue electric bolt sizzled to his hand and limned his insulated suit in ghostly fire. Cursing, he reached again, but the chest was already glowing red-hot and the white-blazing bulkhead aft vas slumping into molten ruin. No time—when it went down, he’d get a radiation blast which would finish him. He dove for the airlock, awkward in free fall now that the gravity unit was gone.

Just in time! His impellers whirled him away. The boat was a nova against the bitter stars of space. Alone—weaponless—supplyless save for the suit’s little emergency pack -7— well, that planet had better be habitable!

It was a great cottony ball of cloud below him, blinding in the harsh spatial sunlight. Below him—yes, he was close enough, well within the region of perceptible gravitation. He turned off his impeller and let himself fall. A few hours--

The silence and loneliness oppressed him. As the thunder of his heart and blood eased, he considered the years ahead, a liftime of separation from humankind and all he had known. The lifetime would be short unless he was lucky. His name would be bandied among the Traders for perhaps a decade, and then his very memory would be dust.

Well—not much he could do about it. At least his instruments had told him the planet was Terra-type: about the same size and mass, pretty similar atmosphere. That meant green plants, which in turn meant animals with high probability, which might mean intelligent natives; but of course everything might be poisonous to his metabolism. He didn’t think the natives would be very far advanced, technologically; the planet was rather close to its sun, an obscure G6 dwarf, steamy and tropical and perpetually cloudy—so it was unlikely that its dwellers would have much concept of astronomy, the father of the sciences. Still, you never knew. •

First there was the problem of getting down. He gave himself a northward velocity—the subarctic regions would be most comfortable for a human.

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