“They tried a foray,” said Angel. He threw on his chest lights and the metal escape door gleamed.
They lifted it swiftly and plunged down the steps, closing it behind them. An airlock was before them.
“Keep your helmet on,” said Angel. He went through.
At the third door they paused and took the safeties off their Tommy guns. They went through alertly. But no one barred their way and they entered the main tunnel. To their right they could see their big ports beyond which stood their ship.
Supplies were scattered along the walls. Space suits hung on pegs. Weapons were racked.
“Come along,” said Angel.
They confronted the first series of doors which led to Slavinsky. In the first, second and third chambers they found no one. The fourth was locked.
Angel waved Whittaker back and from the second chamber sighted with the bazooka on the locked door.
“Look alive in case anybody comes,” said Angel.
Whittaker placed the missile and then stepped aside, Tommy gun ready.
The trajectory of the rocket flamed out. Smoke and dust dissolved the far door. The echoing concussion buffeted them, unheard through their suits.
Angel was up with a rush, cleaving the billows of cordite. His charge brought him straight into the inner sanctum.
And there, pistol gripped but flung back, was Slavinsky.
The black eyes glared. The yellow teeth showed. Whatever he yelled Angel could not hear. The pistol jerked and a cartridge empty flipped up.
Angel chopped down with the Tommy gun.
And discovered the engineering fact that metal still fifty degrees below zero centigrade does not work well. The firing pin fell short.
The lucite casque fanned out a gauzy pattern but the slug did not penetrate, leaving only a blot.
Angel threw the gun straight at Slavinsky’s head. Slavinsky ducked the weapon. But he did not duck the chair which followed it. He staggered back, losing his grip on the pistol.
In Angel’s radio, Whittaker’s voice yelled, “Three Ruskies are comin’!”
“Use a grenade!” cried Angel. And he flung himself bodily upon Slavinsky.
The metal mittens were clumsy and could not find the general’s throat. Slavinsky got a heel into Angel’s belt and catapulted him with a smash against the ceiling.
Angel flung himself back. Slavinsky’s naked torso was nothing to grip.
“Get him!” howled Whittaker. “They got us penned in!”
Angel grabbed for the sling of the Tommy gun. The weapon leaped up, amazingly light. But it had mass and mass counted. He drove the butt through Slavinsky’s guard, drove in the teeth, the nose, brought sheets of blood into the eyes, crushed the jutting jaw and obliterated the face.
He spun about to find Whittaker holding a bulging door. Angel reached into his kit and pulled out a flask.
“Let them in!”
“They’re in!” roared Whittaker.
The bottle of lewisite exploded against the wall beside the first Russian, spraying out over his naked skin.
The rest plowed forward. They plowed, caught their throats, strangled and dropped.
Angel turned and popped a space cloak and helmet on the remains of Slavinsky. He wanted him alive before the gas reached clear across the chamber. “Stay here,” said Angel. And he plunged out.
He found Boyd in a cell, safe enough, carefully garbed in his space helmet.
“It was horrible,” said Boyd. “The fools grabbed those cigarettes like you said they would. They distributed all of them to everybody but Slavinsky and he hits marijuana instead. And then they started to light up. Even them that didn’t get to take a puff got it from the rest. Lootenant, don’t never feed me no lewisite cigarette!”
“Anybody else you know of back here?” said Angel sweetly.
“Whoever survived rushed up to where you came in. Geez, Lootenant, what if that had missed?”
“We’d be working in St. Peter’s army,” grinned Angel. “Keep that helmet on. This whole place must be full of gas.”
They went back to Slavinsky’s office and from there made way into the communications center.
Boyd set the wave lengths and called.
When they had Washington as though they were Russians, Angel took the aircraft code from his kit and began to give them news that Russia wouldn’t know in time.
“We have met Slavinsky,” he coded. “I am in possession of this objective and require reinforcements immediately. The enemy is dead except for stragglers outside who will die. Tell the highest in command to send force quickly. We are victorious!”
Whittaker put an affectionate hand on Angel’s shoulder and shook it gently. Angel felt terrible.
“Lieutenant,” said the surgeon, “you’d better come around. It’s nearly time.”
The watch on his wrist gleamed as hugely as a steeple clock and said, “Zero three fifty-one” in an unnecessarily loud voice.
He was dressed somehow and they shoved him into the corridor, which was at least half the distance to Mars. A potted palm fell down and became a general.
“Fine morning, fine morning, Lieutenant. You look fit. Fit, sir. No clouds and a splendid full moon.”
The aide was brilliant. Angel knew him well. The aide had been an upperclassman when Angel was at the Point.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the aide sidewise to the general. “But we’ve just time to brief him as we ride down. Here, this way, Lieutenant.”
When they were in the car the aide said, “You have been thoroughly briefed before. But there must be a quick resumé unless you think you are thoroughly cognizant of your duties.”
Angel would have answered but all that came out was a groan.
“You will phone all data back to us. Our tests show that the wave can travel much farther than that. Anything you may think important, beyond maps and perhaps geology, you are permitted to note and report.
“Under no circumstances are you to attempt to change any control settings in your ship. All instructions are in this packet.”
Angel shoved the brown packet into his pocket with a twinge of pain. What a hangover. And what a dreadfully confused night he had had!
Colonel Anthony got him out of the car, through the crowd and up the ladder.
Whittaker was standing there, indolently chewing tobacco. Metal glinted behind them in the interior. Commander Dawson of the Navy prowled around the ship and then went to take his post.
“You’ve got a week to sober up, my boy,” said Anthony.
“I’ll be fine,” said Angel, managing a smile.
Angel stepped from the ladder to the platform.
“Board!” shouted Dawson.
Floodlights and cameras and upraised faces. There was a hushed, awed stillness.
Boyd had a big pair of glasses fixed upon the full moon. He was adjusting them to get the proper focus. Suddenly Angel grabbed the glasses away and stabbed them at the brilliant orb.
With a little sigh of relief he gave the glasses back and with a wave of his hand to the crowd, entered the ship.
The door closed. The spectators were waved hurriedly back.
There was a crash of jets, a flash of metal.
The spaceship was gone.
In spite of nightmares and hangovers, Man had begun his first flight into outer space.
Story Preview
NOW that you’ve just ventured through some of the captivating tales in the Stories from the Golden Age collection by L. Ron Hubbard, turn the page and enjoy a preview of The Great Secret. Join Fanner Marston, a man whose greed and lust for power drives him through a blistering desert to the legendary city of Parva, where a secret awaits which will give him absolute control over all the universe.
The Great Secret
SWEEPING clouds shadowed the tawny plain, and far off in the east the plumes of night spread gently, mournfully, burying the corpse of the Livian day. Fanner Marston, a tattered speck upon a ridge, looked eastward, looked to the glory he sought and beheld it.
Throat and tongue swollen with thirst, green eyes blazing now with new ecstasy, he knew he had it. He would gain it, would realize that heady height upon which he had elected to stand. Before him lay the Great Secret! The Secret which had made a dead race rule the Universe! And that Secret would be his, Fanner Marston’s, and Fanner Marston would be the ruler, the new ruler, the arbiter of destiny for all the Universe!
All through these weeks he had stumbled over the gutted plains toward these blue mountains beneath the scorching double sun. He had suffered agonies but he had won!
There, glittering in the yellow sunlight was Parva, dead, beautiful city of the ancients, city of the blessed, city of knowledge and power.
Fanner laughed. He was strong; he was lean; but he was not handsome; and of all the things about him this laugh, distorted by thirst-ravaged lips, was the least pleasant. His eyes, which had of late grown so very dull, flamed greenly with the ecstasy which came with that vision.
He had won. They had told him that he could not; the legends said it was not possible for any mortal man to win. But the spell of the ancients was broken, their books were open, their riches lay for the taking. Parva was there! Parva was his!
It mattered nothing to Fanner that nearly twenty miles of gashed and forbidding terrain still lay between him and his goal. It mattered not that his canteens were empty; nor did it matter that, behind the ridge on which he stood, his monocycle, last vehicle of his caravan, was a ruined wreck.
He was glad now that his companions were dead—of thirst, of quarrels, of disease. He would not have to murder the last of them now and so preserve to himself this incalculable thing which awaited him. Fate was shaping everything for him!
He could do these twenty miles by noon of the next day, do them the hard way, on foot and without water, for there was something to sustain him now; he knew that the city was real, had truly existed through all these ages, was just as the history books had said it was. And if this much was true, then all was true. And he had seen the silver river!
Fanner’s boots were scuffed relics but he set forth down the rocky slope and so great was his ecstasy that he did not feel the sharp bites of the rocks, nor did he feel the fingers of thirst which were throttling him. He was hard; he could outlive forty men and had done it; he would succeed, for he was Fanner Marston!
He had fought these deserts and mountains and he had whipped them—almost. He would live through to the end, and see the Great Secret which awaited him emblazon his name throughout space!
Fanner Marston would bring a new era, a day when spaceships no longer had to land in seas to save themselves from being shattered, when men would be hampered no longer in combating the atmospheres of many now uninhabitable planets. The wealth of the Universe would be his for the taking; the entire race of mankind would bow to his command like vassals. For there, glittering in the sunset, was Parva—Parva, the city of the Great Secret.
Darkness caught him, and he groped his stumbling way among a great forest of black boulders. He did not mind the shocks of falling, the cuts inflicted upon him, the gouges of the unkind earth; nor did he mind the constantly increasing size of his tongue. Distance he had mastered; mere thirst would not stop him now. And besides, he had seen it, just like in the legends. The silver river. What cared he for thirst when that mighty stream awaited him?
Fanner Marston, master of the Universe: it was a pleasant title to resound through his brain.
Black-mouthed with thirst, stumbling with fatigue, lightheaded with his dream of power, he struggled on through the night.
To find out more about The Great Secret and how you can obtain your copy, go to www.goldenagestories.com.
L. Ron Hubbard in the
Golden Age of
Pulp Fiction
In writing an adventure story
a writer has to know that he is adventuring
for a lot of people who cannot.
The writer has to take them here and there
about the globe and show them
excitement and love and realism.
As long as that writer is living the part of an
adventurer when he is hammering
the keys, he is succeeding with his story.
Adventuring is a state of mind.
If you adventure through life, you have a
good chance to be a success on paper.
Adventure doesn’t mean globe-trotting,
exactly, and it doesn’t mean great deeds.
Adventuring is like art.
You have to live it to make it real.
— L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
and American
Pulp Fiction
BORN March 13, 1911, L. Ron Hubbard lived a life at least as expansive as the stories with which he enthralled a hundred million readers through a fifty-year career.
Originally hailing from Tilden, Nebraska, he spent his formative years in a classically rugged Montana, replete with the cowpunchers, lawmen and desperadoes who would later people his Wild West adventures. And lest anyone imagine those adventures were drawn from vicarious experience, he was not only breaking broncs at a tender age, he was also among the few whites ever admitted into Blackfoot society as a bona fide blood brother. While if only to round out an otherwise rough and tumble youth, his mother was that rarity of her time—a thoroughly educated woman—who introduced her son to the classics of Occidental literature even before his seventh birthday.
But as any dedicated L. Ron Hubbard reader will attest, his world extended far beyond Montana. In point of fact, and as the son of a United States naval officer, by the age of eighteen he had traveled over a quarter of a million miles. Included therein were three Pacific crossings to a then still mysterious Asia, where he ran with the likes of Her British Majesty’s agent-in-place for North China, and the last in the line of Royal Magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. For the record, L. Ron Hubbard was also among the first Westerners to gain admittance to forbidden Tibetan monasteries below Manchuria, and his photographs of China’s Great Wall long graced American geography texts.
Upon his return to the United States and a hasty completion of his interrupted high school education, the young Ron Hubbard entered George Washington University. There, as fans of his aerial adventures may have heard, he earned his wings as a pioneering barnstormer at the dawn of American aviation. He also earned a place in free-flight record books for the longest sustained flight above Chicago. Moreover, as a roving reporter for Sportsman Pilot (featuring his first professionally penned articles), he further helped inspire a generation of pilots who would take America to world airpower.
L. Ron Hubbard, left, at Congressional Airport, Washington, DC, 1931, with members of George Washington University flying club.
Immediately beyond his sophomore year, Ron embarked on the first of his famed ethnological expeditions, initially to then untrammeled Caribbean shores (descriptions of which would later fill a whole series of West Indies mystery-thrillers). That the Puerto Rican interior would also figure into the future of Ron Hubbard stories was likewise no accident. For in addition to cultural studies of the island, a 1932–33 LRH expedition is rightly remembered as conducting the first complete mineralogical survey of a Puerto Rico under United States jurisdiction.
There was many another adventure along this vein: As a lifetime member of the famed Explorers Club, L. Ron Hubbard charted North Pacific waters with the first shipboard radio direction finder, and so pioneered a long-range navigation system universally employed until the late twentieth century. While not to put too fine an edge on it, he also held a rare Master Mariner’s license to pilot any vessel, o
f any tonnage in any ocean.
Capt. L. Ron Hubbard in Ketchikan, Alaska, 1940, on his Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition, the first of three voyages conducted under the Explorers Club Flag.
Yet lest we stray too far afield, there is an LRH note at this juncture in his saga, and it reads in part:
“I started out writing for the pulps, writing the best I knew, writing for every mag on the stands, slanting as well as I could.”
To which one might add: His earliest submissions date from the summer of 1934, and included tales drawn from true-to-life Asian adventures, with characters roughly modeled on British/American intelligence operatives he had known in Shanghai. His early Westerns were similarly peppered with details drawn from personal experience. Although therein lay a first hard lesson from the often cruel world of the pulps. His first Westerns were soundly rejected as lacking the authenticity of a Max Brand yarn (a particularly frustrating comment given L. Ron Hubbard’s Westerns came straight from his Montana homeland, while Max Brand was a mediocre New York poet named Frederick Schiller Faust, who turned out implausible six-shooter tales from the terrace of an Italian villa).
Nevertheless, and needless to say, L. Ron Hubbard persevered and soon earned a reputation as among the most publishable names in pulp fiction, with a ninety percent placement rate of first-draft manuscripts. He was also among the most prolific, averaging between seventy and a hundred thousand words a month. Hence the rumors that L. Ron Hubbard had redesigned a typewriter for faster keyboard action and pounded out manuscripts on a continuous roll of butcher paper to save the precious seconds it took to insert a single sheet of paper into manual typewriters of the day.
L. Ron Hubbard, circa 1930, at the outset of a literary career that would span half a century.
That all L. Ron Hubbard stories did not run beneath said byline is yet another aspect of pulp fiction lore. That is, as publishers periodically rejected manuscripts from top-drawer authors if only to avoid paying top dollar, L. Ron Hubbard and company just as frequently replied with submissions under various pseudonyms. In Ron’s case, the list included: Rene Lafayette, Captain Charles Gordon, Lt. Scott Morgan and the notorious Kurt von Rachen—supposedly on the lam for a murder rap, while hammering out two-fisted prose in Argentina. The point: While L. Ron Hubbard as Ken Martin spun stories of Southeast Asian intrigue, LRH as Barry Randolph authored tales of romance on the Western range—which, stretching between a dozen genres is how he came to stand among the two hundred elite authors providing close to a million tales through the glory days of American Pulp Fiction.