Spacemen, Go Home by Lesser Milton

Author:Lesser, Milton [Lesser, Milton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Amazon: B00HBAVLLE
Goodreads: 14758847
Publisher: Thunderchild Publishing
Published: 1961-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12 Mexico Again

The same reasons that had prompted Captain Strayer to select northern Norway as the location of Project Nobel were now working in Harry Gault’s favor.

Earth’s population stood at more than five billion, and even during the exciting decades of interstellar exploration the final frontiers on Earth were being pushed back.

What once had been the uncharted Mato Grosso jungle in Brazil was now cultivated farmland that helped feed South America’s billion inhabitants.

Two million square miles of what had been the Sahara desert were irrigated by sea water piped over the Atlas Mountains after its salt content had been removed, and even the fabled, remote city of Timbuktu was a thriving center of commerce.

The Gobi desert was a prairie which fed the plumpest cattle on Earth; hundreds of huge farms sprawled across what once had been the basin of the Congo River; for the first time in its history the yearly flood of the great Nile was fully controlled and exploited so that Egypt had become a vast grainery.

Only the high northern latitudes, because their growing season was too short and their soil too poor, hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. In Norway, the expanse of tundra country from the Arctic Circle north to Hammerfest and North Cape still supplied barely enough forage for the nomadic Lapps and their reindeer herds, and civilized settlements were few and widely scattered. Originally, the Project Nobel base had been an experimental rocket base for the Scandinavian countries. It was surrounded by thousands of square miles of bleak tundra covered by many feet of snow all but a few months of the year. Dotted with lakes and bare hills and threaded with scores of raging rivers that carried the melted snows to the sea, it remained much as it had been for thousands of years.

If you were a fugitive its river gorges and clumps of trees, stunted by frost and wind, offered numerous hiding places. Even with the eternal summer sunlight you could elude your pursuers; there were so many places to hide.

Captain Strayer learned this the hard way after Harry Gault’s escape from the base. Search parties set out on foot; helicopters went aloft; a nearby encampment of Lapps was recruited to assist the searchers.

None of them so much as found Harry Gault’s trail, let alone the man himself.

Meanwhile, Andy, his head bandaged and still painful and tender, sat with his brother in Captain Strayer’s office. Strayer was saying:

“It’s no use. We’ll never find him now if we haven’t already. I’m calling the ‘copters in.”

“Then what?” Frank asked.

Captain Strayer shrugged. “Making his escape from the base is one thing, but reporting to Ballinger is another. According to Ruy Alvarez, none of Ballinger’s secret spaceports maintains radio contact with the outside world, Frank. They don’t dare to; it could lead to their discovery. So if Gault reports to Ballinger, it will have to be in person.”

“If he does report to Ballinger, what happens to our twelve volunteers? We can’t just let them walk into a trap.

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