SELECTED FICTION WORKS
BY L. RON HUBBARD
FANTASY
The Case of the Friendly Corpse
Death’s Deputy
Fear
The Ghoul
The Indigestible Triton
Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep
Typewriter in the Sky
The Ultimate Adventure
SCIENCE FICTION
Battlefield Earth
The Conquest of Space
The End Is Not Yet
Final Blackout
The Kilkenny Cats
The Kingslayer
The Mission Earth Dekalogy*
Ole Doc Methuselah
To the Stars
ADVENTURE
The Hell Job series
WESTERN
Buckskin Brigades
Empty Saddles
Guns of Mark Jardine
Hot Lead Payoff
A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s
novellas and short stories is provided at the back.
*Dekalogy—a group of ten volumes
Published by Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028
© 2008 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.
Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.
Cover artwork thumbnail on back of book and story illustration from Argosy Magazine is © 1937 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc. Story Preview cover art from Top-Notch Magazine and horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Cover artwork; Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-59212-654-5 Mobipocket version
ISBN 978-1-59212-602-6 ebook version
ISBN 978-1-59212-295-0 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-233-2 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007928446
Contents
FOREWORD
ORDERS IS ORDERS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
STORY PREVIEW:
WIND-GONE-MAD
GLOSSARY
L. RON HUBBARD
IN THE GOLDEN AGE
OF PULP FICTION
THE STORIES FROM THE
GOLDEN AGE
FOREWORD
Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age
AND it was a golden age.
The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.
“Pulp” magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class “slick” magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the “rest of us,” adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.
The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.
In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.
Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: “The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.”
Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.
In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.
Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called “Hell Job,” in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.
Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he
was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.
This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.
Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.
L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.
Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a great story.
—Kevin J. Anderson
KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of more than ninety critically acclaimed works of speculative fiction, including The Saga of Seven Suns, the continuation of the Dune Chronicles with Brian Herbert, and his New York Times bestselling novelization of L. Ron Hubbard’s Ai! Pedrito!
Orders Is Orders
Chapter One
THE doomed city of Shunkien poured flame-torn billows of smoke skyward to hide the sun. Mile after square mile spread the smoldering expanse of crumbling walls and corpse-littered streets.
And still from the Peking area came the bombers of the Rising Sun to further wreck the ruins. Compact squadrons scudding through the pall of greasy smoke turned, dived, zoomed, leaving black mushrooms swiftly growing behind their racing shadows.
Along a high bluff to the north of town, a line of artillery emplacements belched flame and thunder, and mustard-colored men ministered to their plunging guns.
Japan was pounding wreckage into ashes, wiping out a city which had thrived since the time of Genghis Khan, obliterating a railhead to prevent further concentration of Chinese legions.
Down amid the erupting shambles, three regiments of Chinese troops held on, bellies to dust behind barricades of paving stones, sandbags and barbed wire, shoulders wedged into the embrasures of the cracking walls, intent brown eyes to antiaircraft sights in the uprooted railway station.
They fought because they could not retreat. Two hundred miles and two Japanese army corps stood between them and the sea. Somewhere out in the once-fertile plains two Chinese armies groped for the enemy. But the battle lines were everywhere, running parallel to nothing, a huge labyrinth of war engines and marching legions. There was no hope for Shunkien. Once proud signs protruded from the rubble which overlaid the gutters. The thoroughfares were dotted with the unburied dead, men and women and children. Thicker were these ragged bundles near the south gate where lines of refugees had striven to leave the town, only to be blasted down at the very exit.
The cannonading was a deafening monotone. The smoke and dust drifted and entwined. Walls wearily slid outward, slowly at first, then faster to crash with a roar, making an echo to the thunder of artillery along the ridge.
War was here, with Famine on the right and Death upon the left and Pestilence riding rear guard to make the sweep complete.
In the center of the city, close by a boulevard now gutted with shell holes and clogged with wrecked trolleys and automobiles and inert bodies, stood the United States Consulate.
The gates were tightly closed and the walls were still intact and high above, on a tall flagstaff, buffeted by the concussion of shells, Old Glory stood brightly out against the darkness of the smoke.
The building was small and the corridors were jammed with the hundred and sixteen Americans who had taken refuge there. Without baggage, glad enough to be still alive, they sat in groups and nursed their cigarettes and grinned and cracked jokes and made bets on their chances of being missed by all the shells which came shrieking down into the town.
It was hard to talk above the ceaseless roar, but they talked. Talked of Hoboken and Sioux City and Denver and argued the superior merits of their towns. Though their all was invested in and about Shunkien, though most of them had not been home for years, Frisco and Chi and the Big Town furnished the whole of their conversation.
A baby was crying and its white-faced mother tried to sing above the cataract of sound which beat against the walls outside. A machinery salesman tore his linen handkerchief into small bits and stuffed fragments of it into the child’s ears. Thankfully, it stopped whimpering and the mother smiled and the salesman, suddenly finding himself caught, moved hurriedly away before he could be thanked.
Within the consular office, the consul, Thomas Jackson, moved to the side of his radio operator. Jackson was white-haired, small, nervous of face and hands. He looked at the expanse of gleaming dials as though trying to read hope in their metal faces.
The operator, a youth scarcely out of his teens, leaned over a key and rattled it. He threw a switch and pressed the earphones against his head. He lighted a cigarette with nicotine-stained fingers and stuck it in his mouth. He pulled a typewriter to him and began to write.
“I’ve got Shanghai again, sir,” said the operator. “They want to know how we’re holding out.”
“Tell them we’re all right so far, and God knows we’ve been lucky.” Jackson leaned close to the operator and then glanced around to see that no one else in the room could hear. “Tell them for the love of God to get the cholera antitoxin to us if they expect to find any of us alive after this is over. Tell them Asiatic cholera is certain to follow, has already begun. And then tell them that we’ve got to have money—gold. Our checks and paper are no good and the food is running low.”
The young operator precariously perched his cigarette on the already burned edge of his table and began to make the bug click and quiver.
A few minutes later he beckoned to the consul. “They say the USS Miami is already proceeding down the coast with both the serum and the money.”
“Damned little good that will do us,” moaned Jackson. “A cruiser can’t come two hundred miles inland.”
“They said they’d try to get it through to us, sir. They want to know how long we can hold out.”
Jackson ran bony fingers through his awry white hair and looked around him. He singled out a fat little man whose eyes were so deep in his head they could not be seen at all.
“Doctor,” said Jackson, loud enough to be heard above the cannonade but not loud enough for anyone else to overhear, “Doctor, how long do you think we can last without the cholera shots?”
“With corpses strewn from Hell to Halifax?” puffed the doctor. “Now, tomorrow, next week, maybe never.”
“Please,” begged the consul, “you’re not staking your reputation on this. How long will it take?”
“The reports are,” said the doctor, “that it is just now starting to spread. I’ll give it five days to reach here because, in five days, we’ll have to start going out to buy food—if we can find the gold with which to buy it. Otherwise, we stay here bottled up, boil our water and starve to death. We all had cholera shots before we came into this area, but they won’t prove effective unless bolstered with secondary, epidemic shots. If we get that serum here before Saturday, there’s a chance of our living—as far as disease is concerned—through this mess. But mind you, now, you can’t quote me. Anything is liable to happen.”
“Thanks,” said Jackson gratefully.
The consul went back to the youth at the key. “Tell them it’s got to be here by Saturday, Billy. Not a day later. Though how they’ll get it here, only God himself can tell.”
He looked out through the office door into the outside passageway where a hundred and more Americans tried to take it calmly. The floor of the consulate was shaking as though a procession of huge trucks rumbled deafeningly by.
Chapter Two
THE USS Miami, taperingly sleek and gray, with black smoke still pouring from her funnels, dropped anchor thunderously in the yellow roadstead off Liaochow and swung around in the stream of the tide.
From the bridge the coastal city of Liaochow presented a dismal sight. Two air raids and an offshore shelling by the Japanese men-o’-war had rid the place of Chinese defense and the flames still smoldered amid the festering ruins.
A dark horde of Japanese destroyers and cruisers and troopships lay at anchor near the shore and launches were carrying load after load of Japanese troops to the landings. Lighters behind struggling tugs were deep with howitzers and tanks bound for various destinations along a two-thousand-mile front which stretched from Peking to Shanghai.
His cruiser riding aloof and alone, the Navy captain surveyed the cluttered, smoky waterfront through his glasses. Then, hopelessly, he let the binoculars thump against his chest and thrust his big red hands into the pockets of his coat, scowling at the panorama of devastation.
“We haven’t got a chance,” he said.
The younger officer beside him, his exec, not bearing all the responsibility, was less downcast. “Oh, I’m certain we can find some way, sir. After all, we’re not at war with Japan or China. As a strictly neutral . . .”
“Yes. Sure. Strictly neutral!” growled the captain. “I’ve got my orders, sir. I’ve got my orders from the C-in-C himself. I am to avoid any slightest possibility of allowing Japan to create an ‘incident.’” He said this bitterly as though a few hearty salvos would have done him a world of good.