Hell Stuff For Planet X by Raymond Z. Gallun

Author:Raymond Z. Gallun [Gallun, Raymond Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Collection
Published: 2021-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

THE jail guard was a nice chap. He had wandered off discreetly down the corridor. And secret listening-phones are forbidden by law. So Spud said to me in a low, conversational tone:

“You quit your rocket engineer’s job with Lorson, eh, Buck? Good! They would have tried to bounce you because I happen to be your brother. But you just told them that you were leaving, and didn’t get mad, huh? That was good, Buck. But don’t ever think it’s over yet. Avery’s still out there on the Silver Pall comet, and he’ll go on testing meteor armor. And me—well, I figured I’d have bad luck sometime, so I was kind of prepared before I got hooked.’’

Spud paused then, and I knew some of the tension and determination under his grin, even though I couldn’t see it. He continued to fuss with his right biceps, pinching it significantly with calloused fingers.

The skin of his upper arm was all peppered with little scars, like those of antique buckshot. Fragments of an unusually slow meteor, ricocheting repeatedly inside a punctured ship of the void, had made them. Some of those fragments were still imbedded in the muscles.

“I’m not fighting against the law, Buck,’’ Spud continued, his eyes shining strangely. “I’m fighting for law, and against those that misuse it. You know that. And sometimes the means may have to be a little rough, when things get desperate. So, you see, when they put me in stir, they’ll examine me carefully for weapons. They'll X-ray my body, and their plates will show the meteor particles in my arm. I’ll tell them what they are, naturally, and how I got them. And most likely they won’t look further.

“They won’t know that before I even left the Silver Pall, I gashed my arm and put three little globes just under the skin, and let the wound heal over them. They’ll think those globes are meteor particles too, not capsules of the new uranium tetramekalate. I’ll be a model prisoner, Buck. And I’ll wait a long time.”

Uranium tetramekalate! Even professional criminals hadn’t used it yet! It was so strange, hearing Spud talk so quietly like that, like a crook, planning. My heart started to pound wildly.

But I knew what was driving him. It wasn't just his unfair imprisonment. Not just an inventor’s dream interrupted. Not just buddies that had died with meteors ripping through them, or strangled in riddled space craft that no one yet had been able to armor effectively against bits of cosmic debris that travel at anywhere from three to thirty miles a second.

The latter, of course, was the basic problem. Space craft that leave the Earth have to be light. They can’t carry massive armor.

But it wasn’t just all this. Frank Avery was marooned out there on the Silver Pall comet now. Spud had taken their only ship back to Earth. And that wasn’t all. The comet was going away from the Sun now. It had passed into the region close to the

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