Complete Fiction by Robert Abernathy

Author:Robert Abernathy [Abernathy, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2020-01-14T21:00:00+00:00

1953

THE CAPTAIN’S GETAWAY

BOLD WAS THE CAPTAIN, PIRATE OF THE VAST INTERPLANETARY SPACES . . . BUT THE SCIENTIST WAS BOLDER!

YALMAR GUNN leaned over the table and shook his large, hairy fist in the little Scientist’s mild face. The gesture was pure drama, but, Norry Falk told himself, obviously Gunn was a man of dramatic gestures.

“By the stars,” he bellowed with all the ferocity at his command, “you’ll hand it over, or I’ll lift my ship tonight and blow your deleted city to atoms!”

The two other men at the council table in the Perkunian tower chamber held their breaths. For that matter, Norry Falk, Savant Twens Dalen’s thirty-year-old assistant, had been holding his consistently since the space captain’s voice had begun to rise and he Bad taken to fondling his flame pistol. Now even the hard-faced lieutenant whom Gunn had brought with him to the meeting removed his pipe from his mouth and seemed to grow tense.

Falk eyed bitterly the captain’s holstered gun; in view of the growing distrust between the men of Science City and the crew of the Fomalhaut, there had been a no-weapons clause in the terms for the parley. Ridiculous, perhaps, since the warship’s guns completely commanded Science City from its berth out on the airless surface. But Falk wished ardently that he had smuggled in at least a small needle-gun on his own account.

Twens Dalen, blinking a little at the large fist as the other let it fall, still clenched, was speaking, with a choice of words which betrayed a passion for precise statement. “It is not a question of those alternatives, Captain,” he said quietly. “If Science City must be blown to atoms, as you put it, it will not be by your agency.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Gunn scowled with all his big blond face. He had once been accustomed to be polite—almost silky, in fact—with the personnel of captured cargo or passenger vessels in the depths of space; but those had been occasions on which he had held all the cards. Now his nerves were on edge; before he had left his bridge to come to the parley, he had rechecked a certain set of figures on the calculator, and the results might have shaken even a better balanced individual.

Dalen blinked again; but a little of his studiedly courteous manner fell from him as he spoke. “I’m aware, Captain Gunn, that you are the representative of no stellar government whatsoever; in short, you are a private. Furthermore, your ship escaped to Perkunas after a brush with a Bellatrician patrol cruiser in deep space, and you believe yourself to have been pursued. You have calculated the time required for the patrol ship to change course; it should arrive within twenty days.”

As the pirate, silenced for once, merely stared at him, the Savant explained gently: “You see, Captain, Perkunas, though technocratically governed and devoted to the pursuit of pure science, has its working classes and its taverns—where some of your crew on leave saw fit to talk.

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