Bob Shaw SF Gateway Omnibus by Bob Shaw

Author:Bob Shaw [Shaw, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Collection
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The soldier was so drunk that he would have been unable to stand but for the support of the two military policemen who gripped his arms. From the state of his uniform it was obvious that he had fallen more than once, and had been helplessly sick. In spite of his physical misery, he was terrified in the presence of Colonel Tommy Freeborn, and he told his story in disconnected groups of words – with frequent lapses into Swahili – which made sense only to someone who already had the general picture. When he had finished speaking, the Colonel stared at him with leaden-eyed contempt.

‘You’re positive,’ Freeborn said, after a pause, ‘that it was the white man, Snook, who had the weapon?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The soldier’s head rolled from side to side as he spoke. ‘And I only done what the Lieutenant told me.’

‘Take this object away,’ Freeborn ordered. As the redcaps bundled the soldier out of the office, the sergeant who accompanied them glanced back with an unspoken question. Freeborn nodded and mimed the action of pulling a hat down over his ears. The sergeant – who was a useful man, and knew that the invisible hat was a polythene bag – saluted correctly and left the office.

As soon as he was alone, Colonel Freeborn lowered his head and thought for a few moments about his brother’s son, then he opened a communicator channel and gave a series of orders which would assemble a force of a hundred men at the entrance to National Mine No. 3. He picked up his cane, licked a speck of dust from his half-sleeved shirt, and, walking with a firm and measured tread went outside to where his car was waiting. It was two hours before dawn and the night wind was cold, but he waved away the coat offered by his driver and got into the car’s rear seat.

During the drive from Kisumu he sat without moving, bare arms folded, and in his mind apportioned the blame for his nephew’s death. One part he allocated to himself – in his efforts to eradicate Curt’s weaknesses he had pushed the boy too hard and threatened him with too much; a larger portion he laid at the door of Paul Ogilvie, without whose interference there would have been no unwanted foreigners meddling with the operation of the mine; but the greatest share of the guilt lay with the insolent trickster, Gilbert Snook, who should have been put down like a dog on the day he entered Barandi.

The hour was not yet ripe for Ogilvie to be brought to book, but within a short time – a very short time, Freeborn promised himself – Snook would regret that he had not been quietly suffocated three years earlier. Each thought of Snook was like the opening of a furnace door within Freeborn’s head, and as he neared the mine he could feel himself being buoyed higher and higher on the searing blasts. It was like a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.