Kenneth Bulmer by Worlds for the Taking

Author:Worlds for the Taking
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-08-27T13:20:11+00:00

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ALREADY THE FIRST steel mill had belched its loud and soulless burp against the planet Jethro and the first plates had skittered off the rollers, shimmering with peacock-tailed color, pooled with liquid oily reflections of a new sun in the Jethroan sky.

No longer the sun, Jezreel, but the Sun, Centaurus. No longer—Jezreeljethro—but Centaurusjethro.

The steel mill began with a never satisfied maw burrowing deep into the heart of the Mountains of Carmel Jones and extending through a whole complicated series of automated shops and foundries and mills, ended by the banks of the river Yasmeen. Already the Lapiz Lake showed bands and streaks of putrefaction and industrial contamination.

"Of course," the hemisphere manager had said, warmly believing his own industrial propaganda, "of course, all the effluents will be cleared up in time. We'll have this planet looking ship-shape in no time at all I No time at all!"

"It always looked pretty good to me before." Colin Copping had aged since the day he and Arnold Gunderson had tried to blow up a SCS spaceship. Now—now he had other plans.

"We won't let it rest like this, Colin." Simon Strang stood braced against the feel of the world about him, a world called to his attention by a despairing message from Tom and Fay Bames. They were old friends in the inchoate but articulate half-world in which Simon lived, of the House of Wolfgang, an old imperious House of much fame. Old Rainscarfe had called the head of his parent House of Wolfgang as soon as their ships had made planetfall again; but by then, nothing but the Construction Service could have moved Jethro back. And the SCS were not in the business of taking planets away from the Solarian Confederation.

Now Simon Strang was saying good-bye. He had done what he could, raised what dust-devils he had been able to blow into being; but everyone, once the Lansen generators had begun to whine deep in the core of Jethro, had known that the process was irreversible.

Anthea was weeping. Old Rainscarfe, Gunderson, Dirk Tiamat, Arthur Copping, all stood uncomfortably on the edge of the raw concrete landing field. Brilliantly lit brand-new hangars serrated the sky. Somewhere beneath their steel and concrete roots, the crushed bulbs of Anthea's daffodils would never flower again.

"Good-bye, Simon!" they called. To Strang their voices sounded like a last sea dirge for a hero sliding to his last bourn in the empty reaches of the sea.

Strange how mankind had this hate-love relationship with the sea carried over into his feelings for the wider ocean of space. Homer would have understood the men and women who ventured across the light-splintered parsecs in their frail metal shells of air. But there was no blind Homer alive today to sing a song of the scourge of space, a last lay of the light-years.

Arthur Copping gripped his son by the shoulders. He looked searchingly into his face and then, as though reassured by what he found there, nodded briefly. A hard man, he expected strength and durability in his son above anyone else.

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