H. Beam Piper - Lone Star Planet

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 348.72KB 67 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Lone Star Planet

H. Beam Piper

and

John J. McGuire

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

Lone Star Planet

ace books

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY

360 Park Avenue South

New York, New York 10010

LONE STAR PLANET

Originally published as A PLANET FOR TEXANS

inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

This Ace Printing: April 1979

Printed in U.S.A.

CHAPTER I

They started giving me the business as soon as I came through the door into the Secretary's outer office.

There was Ethel K'wang-Li, the Secretary's receptionist, at her desk. There was Courtlant Staynes, the

assistant secretary to the Undersecretary for Economic Penetration, and Norman Gazarin, from Protocol,

and Toby Lawder, from Humanoid Peoples' Affairs, and Raoul Chavier, and Hans Mannteufel, and Olga

Reznik.

It was a wonder there weren't more of them watching the condemned man's march to the gibbet: the

word that the Secretary had called me in must have gotten all over the Department since the offices had

opened.

"Ah, Mr. Machiavelli, I presume," Ethel kicked off.

"Machiavelli, Junior." Olga picked up the ball. "At least, that's the way he signs it."

"God's gift to the Consular Service, and the Consular Service's gift to Policy Planning," Gazarin added.

"Take it easy, folks. These Hooligan Diplomats would as soon shoot you as look at you," Mannteufel

warned.

"Be sure and tell the Secretary that your friends all want important posts in the Galactic Empire." Olga

again.

"Well, I'm glad some of you could read it," I fired back. "Maybe even a few of you understood what it

was all about."

"Don't worry, Silk," Gazarin told me. "Secretary Ghopal understands what it was all about. All too well,

you'll find."

A buzzer sounded gently on Ethel K'wang-Li's desk. She snatched up the handphone and whispered into

it. A deathly silence filled the room while she listened, whispered some more, then hung it up.

They were all staring at me.

"Secretary Ghopal is ready to see Mr. Stephen Silk," she said. "This way, please."

As I started across the room, Staynes began drumming on the top of the desk with his fingers, the slow

reiterated rhythm to which a man marches to a military execution.

"A cigarette?" Lawder inquired tonelessly. "A glass of rum?"

There were three men in the Secretary of State's private office. Ghopal Singh, the Secretary, dark-faced,

gray-haired, slender and elegant, meeting me halfway to his desk. Another slender man, in black, with a

silver-threaded, black neck-scarf: Rudolf Klüng, the Secretary of the Department of Aggression.

And a huge, gross-bodied man with a fat baby-face and opaque black eyes.

When I saw him, I really began to get frightened.

The fat man was Natalenko, the Security Coördinator.

"Good morning, Mister Silk," Secretary Ghopal greeted me, his hand extended. "Gentlemen, Mr.

Stephen Silk, about whom we were speaking. This way, Mr. Silk, if you please."

There was a low coffee-table at the rear of the office, and four easy chairs around it. On the round brass

table-top were cups and saucers, a coffee urn, cigarettes—and a copy of the current issue of the

Galactic Statesmen's Journal, open at an article entitled Probable Future Courses of Solar League

Diplomacy, by somebody who had signed himself Machiavelli, Jr.

I was beginning to wish that the pseudonymous Machiavelli, Jr. had never been born, or, at least, had

stayed on Theta Virgo IV and been a wineberry planter as his father had wanted him to be.

As I sat down and accepted a cup of coffee, I avoided looking at the periodical. They were probably

going to hang it around my neck before they shoved me out of the airlock.

"Mr. Silk is, as you know, in our Consular Service," Ghopal was saying to the others. "Back on Luna on

rotation, doing something in Mr. Halvord's section. He is the gentleman who did such a splendid job for

us on Assha—Gamma Norma III.

"And, as he has just demonstrated," he added, gesturing toward the Statesman's Journal on the

Benares-work table, "he is a student both of the diplomacy of the past and the implications of our present

policies."

"A bit frank," Klüng commented dubiously.

"But judicious," Natalenko squeaked, in the high eunuchoid voice that came so incongruously from his

bulk. "He aired his singularly accurate predictions in a periodical that doesn't have a circulation of more

than a thousand copies outside his own department. And I don't think the public's semantic reactions to

the terminology of imperialism is as bad as you imagine. They seem quite satisfied, now, with the change

in the title of your department, from Defense to Aggression."

"Well, we've gone into that, gentlemen," Ghopal said. "If the article really makes trouble for us, we can

always disavow it. There's no censorship of the Journal. And Mr. Silk won't be around to draw fire on

us."

Here it comes, I thought.

"That sounds pretty ominous, doesn't it, Mr. Silk?" Natalenko tittered happily, like a ten-year-old who

has just found a new beetle to pull the legs out of.

"It's really not as bad as it sounds, Mr. Silk," Ghopal hastened to reassure me. "We are going to have to

banish you for a while, but I daresay that won't be so bad. The social life here on Luna has probably

begun to pall, anyhow. So we're sending you to Capella IV."

"Capella IV," I repeated, trying to remember something about it. Capella was a GO-type, like Sol; that

wouldn't be so bad.

"New Texas," Klüng helped me out.

Oh, God, no! I thought.

"It happens that we need somebody of your sort on that planet, Mr. Silk," Ghopal said. "Some of the

trouble is in my department and some of it is in Mr. Klüng's; for that reason, perhaps it would be better if

Coördinator Natalenko explained it to you."

"You know, I assume, our chief interest in New Texas?" Natalenko asked.

"I had some of it for breakfast, sir," I replied. "Supercow."

Natalenko tittered again. "Yes, New Texas is the butcher shop of the galaxy. In more ways than one, I'm

afraid you'll find. They just butchered one of our people there a short while ago. Our Ambassador, in

fact."

That would be Silas Cumshaw, and this was the first I'd heard about it.

I asked when it had happened.

"A couple of months ago. We just heard about it last evening, when the news came in on a freighter from

there. Which serves to point up something you stressed in your article—the difficulties of trying to run a

centralized democratic government on a galactic scale. But we have another interest, which may be even

more urgent than our need for New Texan meat. You've heard, of course, of the z'Srauff."

That was a statement, not a question; Natalenko wasn't trying to insult me. I knew who the z'Srauff were;

I'd run into them, here and there. One of the extra-solar intelligent humanoid races, who seemed to have

been evolved from canine or canine-like ancestors, instead of primates. Most of them could speak Basic

English, but I never saw one who would admit to understanding more of our language than the 850-word

Basic vocabulary. They occupied a half-dozen planets in a small star-cluster about forty light-years

beyond the Capella system. They had developed normal-space reaction-drive ships before we came into

contact with them, and they had quickly picked up the hyperspace-drive from us back in those days

when the Solar League was still playing Missionaries of Progress and trying to run a galaxy-wide

Point-Four program.

In the past century, it had become almost impossible for anybody to get into their star-group, although

z'Srauff ships were orbiting in on every planet that the League had settled or controlled. There were

z'Srauff traders and small merchants all over the galaxy, and you almost never saw one of them without a

camera. Their little meteor-mining boats were everywhere, and all of them carried more of the most

modern radar and astrogational equipment than a meteor-miner's lifetime earnings would pay for.

I also knew that they were one of the chief causes of ulcers and premature gray hair at the League capital

on Luna. I'd done a little reading on pre-spaceflight Terran history; I had been impressed by the parallel

between the present situation and one which had culminated, two and a half centuries before, on the

morning of 7 December, 1941.

"What," Natalenko inquired, "do you think Machiavelli, Junior would do about the z'Srauff?"

"We have a Department of Aggression," I replied. "Its mottoes are, 'Stop trouble before it starts,' and, 'If

we have to fight, let's do it on the other fellow's real estate.' But this situation is just a little too delicate for

literal application of those principles. An unprovoked attack on the z'Srauff would set every other

non-human race in the galaxy against us.... Would an attack by the z'Srauff on New Texas constitute just

provocation?"

"It might. New Texas is an independent planet. Its people are descendants of emigrants from Terra who

wanted to get away from the rule of the Solar League. We've been trying for half a century to persuade

the New Texan government to join the League. We need their planet, for both strategic and commercial

reasons. With the z'Srauff for neighbors, they need us as much at least as we need them. The problem is

to make them understand that."

I nodded again. "And an attack by the z'Srauff would do that, too, sir," I said.

Natalenko tittered again. "You see, gentlemen! Our Mr. Silk picks things up very handily, doesn't he?"

He turned to Secretary of State Ghopal. "You take it from there," he invited.

Ghopal Singh smiled benignly. "Well, that's it, Stephen," he said. "We need a man on New Texas who

can get things done. Three things, to be exact.

"First, find out why poor Mr. Cumshaw was murdered, and what can be done about it to maintain our

prestige without alienating the New Texans.

"Second, bring the government and people of New Texas to a realization that they need the Solar League

as much as we need them.

"And, third, forestall or expose the plans for the z'Srauff invasion of New Texas."

Is that all, now? I thought. He doesn't want a diplomat; he wants a magician.

"And what," I asked, "will my official position be on New Texas, sir? Or will I have one, of any sort?"

"Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Silk. Your official position will be that of Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Envoy

Extraordinary. That, I believe, is the only vacancy which exists in the Diplomatic Service on that planet."

At Dumbarton Oaks Diplomatic Academy, they haze the freshmen by making them sit on a one-legged

stool and balance a teacup and saucer on one knee while the upper classmen pelt them with ping-pong

balls. Whoever invented that and the other similar forms of hazing was one of the great geniuses of the

Service. So I sipped my coffee, set down the cup, took a puff from my cigarette, then said:

"I am indeed deeply honored, Mr. Secretary. I trust I needn't go into any assurances that I will do

everything possible to justify your trust in me."

"I believe he will, Mr. Secretary," Natalenko piped, in a manner that chilled my blood.

"Yes, I believe so," Ghopal Singh said. "Now, Mr. Ambassador, there's a liner in orbit two thousand

miles off Luna, which has been held from blasting off for the last eight hours, waiting for you. Don't bother

packing more than a few things; you can get everything you'll need aboard, or at New Austin, the

planetary capital. We have a man whom Coördinator Natalenko has secured for us, a native New

Texan, Hoddy Ringo by name. He'll act as your personal secretary. He's aboard the ship now. You'll

have to hurry, I'm afraid.... Well, bon voyage, Mr. Ambassador."

CHAPTER II

The death-watch outside had grown to about fifteen or twenty. They were all waiting in happy

anticipation as I came out of the Secretary's office.

"What did he do to you, Silk?" Courtlant Staynes asked, amusedly.

"Demoted me. Kicked me off the Hooligan Diplomats," I said glumly.

"Demoted you from the Consular Service?" Staynes asked scornfully. "Impossible!"

"Yes. He demoted me to the Cookie Pushers. Clear down to Ambassador."

They got a terrific laugh. I went out, wondering what sort of noises they'd make, the next morning, when

the appointments sheet was posted.

I gathered a few things together, mostly small personal items, and all the microfilms that I could find on

New Texas, then got aboard the Space Navy cutter that was waiting to take me to the ship. It was a

four-hour trip and I put in the time going over my hastily-assembled microfilm library and using a

stenophone to dictate a reading list for the spacetrip.

As I rolled up the stenophone-tape, I wondered what sort of secretary they had given me; and, in

passing, why Natalenko's department had furnished him.

Hoddy Ringo....

Queer name, but in a galactic civilization, you find all sorts of names and all sorts of people bearing them,

so I was prepared for anything.

And I found it.

I found him standing with the ship's captain, inside the airlock, when I boarded the big, spherical

space-liner. A tubby little man, with shoulders and arms he had never developed doing secretarial work,

and a good-natured, not particularly intelligent face.

See the happy moron, he doesn't give a damn, I thought.

Then I took a second look at him. He might be happy, but he wasn't a moron. He just looked like one.

Natalenko's people often did, as one of their professional assets.

I also noticed that he had a bulge under his left armpit the size of an eleven-mm army automatic.

He was, I'd been told, a native of New Texas. I gathered, after talking with him for a while, that he had

been away from his home planet for over five years, was glad to be going back, and especially glad that

he was going back under the protection of Solar League diplomatic immunity.

In fact, I rather got the impression that, without such protection, he wouldn't have been going back at all.

I made another discovery. My personal secretary, it seemed, couldn't read stenotype. I found that out

when I gave him the tape I'd dictated aboard the cutter, to transcribe for me.

"Gosh, boss. I can't make anything out of this stuff," he confessed, looking at the combination

shorthand-Braille that my voice had put onto the tape.

"Well, then, put it in a player and transcribe it by ear," I told him.

He didn't seem to realize that that could be done.

"How did you come to be sent as my secretary, if you can't do secretarial work?" I wanted to know.

He got out a bag of tobacco and a book of papers and began rolling a cigarette, with one hand.

"Why, shucks, boss, nobody seemed to think I'd have to do this kinda work," he said. "I was just sent

along to show you the way around New Texas, and see you don't get inta no trouble."

He got his handmade cigarette drawing, and hitched the strap that went across his back and looped

under his right arm. "A guy that don't know the way around can get inta a lotta trouble on New Texas. If

you call gettin' killed trouble."

So he was a bodyguard ... and I wondered what else he was. One thing, it would take him forty-two

years to send a radio message back to Luna, and I could keep track of any other messages he sent, in

letters or on tape, by ships. In the end, I transcribed my own tape, and settled down to laying out my

three weeks' study-course on my new post.

I found, however, that the whole thing could be learned in a few hours. The rest of what I had was

duplication, some of it contradictory, and it all boiled down to this:

Capella IV had been settled during the first wave of extrasolar colonization, after the Fourth World—or

First Interplanetary—War. Some time around 2100. The settlers had come from a place in North

America called Texas, one of the old United States. They had a lengthy history—independent republic,

admission to the United States, secession from the United States, reconquest by the United States, and

general intransigence under the United States, the United Nations and the Solar League. When the laws

of non-Einsteinian physics were discovered and the hyperspace-drive was developed, practically the

entire population of Texas had taken to space to find a new home and independence from everybody.

They had found Capella IV, a Terra-type planet, with a slightly higher mean temperature, a lower mass

and lower gravitational field, about one-quarter water and three-quarters land-surface, at a stage of

evolutionary development approximately that of Terra during the late Pliocene. They also found

supercow, a big mammal looking like the unsuccessful attempt of a hippopotamus to impersonate a

dachshund and about the size of a nuclear-steam locomotive. On New Texas' plains, there were billions

of them; their meat was fit for the gods of Olympus. So New Texas had become the meat-supplier to the

galaxy.

There was very little in any of the microfilm-books about the politics of New Texas and such as it was, it

was very scornful. There were such expressions as 'anarchy tempered by assassination,' and 'grotesque

parody of democracy.'

There would, I assumed, be more exact information in the material which had been shoved into my hand

just before boarding the cutter from Luna, in a package labeled TOP SECRET: TO BE OPENED

ONLY IN SPACE, AFTER THE FIRST HYPERJUMP. There was also a big trunk that had been

placed in my suite, sealed and bearing the same instructions.

I got Hoddy out of the suite as soon as the ship had passed out of the normal space-time continuum,

locked the door of my cabin and opened the parcel.

It contained only two loose-leaf notebooks, both labeled with the Solar League and Department seals,

both adorned with the customary bloodthirsty threats against the unauthorized and the indiscreet. They

were numbered ONE and TWO.

ONE contained four pages. On the first, I read:

FINAL MESSAGE

OF THE FIRST SOLAR LEAGUE AMBASSADOR

NEW TEXAS

ANDREW JACKSON HICKOCK

I agree with none of the so-called information about this planet on file with the State Department

on Luna. The people of New Texas are certainly not uncouth barbarians. Their manners and

customs, while lively and unconventional, are most charming. Their dress is graceful and

practical, not grotesque; their soft speech is pleasing to the ear. Their flag is the original flag of

the Republic of Texas; it is definitely not a barbaric travesty of our own emblem. And the

underlying premises of their political system should, as far as possible, be incorporated into the

organization of the Solar League. Here politics is an exciting and exacting game, in which only

the true representative of all the people can survive.

DEPARTMENT ADDENDUM

After five years on New Texas, Andrew Jackson Hickock resigned, married a daughter of a local

rancher and became a naturalized citizen of that planet. He is still active in politics there, often in

opposition to Solar League policies.

That didn't sound like too bad an advertisement for the planet. I was even feeling cheerful when I turned

to the next page, and:

FINAL MESSAGE

OF THE SECOND SOLAR LEAGUE

AMBASSADOR TO

NEW TEXAS

CYRIL GODWINSON

Yes and no; perhaps and perhaps not; pardon me; I agree with everything you say. Yes and no;

perhaps and perhaps not; pardon me; I agree....

DEPARTMENT ADDENDUM

After seven years on New Texas, Ambassador Godwinson was recalled; adjudged hopelessly

insane.

And then:

FINAL MESSAGE

OF THE THIRD SOLAR LEAGUE

AMBASSADOR TO NEW TEXAS

R. F. GULLIS

I find it very pleasant to inform you that when you are reading this, I will be dead.

DEPARTMENT ADDENDUM

Committed suicide after six months on New Texas.

I turned to the last page cautiously, found:

FINAL MESSAGE

OF THE FOURTH SOLAR LEAGUE

AMBASSADOR TO NEW TEXAS

SILAS CUMSHAW

I came to this planet ten years ago as a man of pronounced and outspoken convictions. I have

managed to keep myself alive here by becoming an inoffensive nonentity. If I continue in this

course, it will be only at the cost of my self-respect. Beginning tonight, I am going to state and

maintain positive opinions on the relation between this planet and the Solar League.

DEPARTMENT ADDENDUM

Murdered at the home of Andrew J. Hickock. (see p. 1.)

And that was the end of the first notebook. Nice, cheerful reading; complete, solid briefing.

I was, frankly, almost afraid to open the second notebook. I hefted it cautiously at first, saw that it

contained only about as many pages as the first and that those pages were sealed with a band around

them.

I took a quick peek, read the words on the band:

Before reading, open the sealed trunk which has been included with your luggage.

So I laid aside the book and dragged out the sealed trunk, hesitated, then opened it.

Nothing shocked me more than to find the trunk ... full of clothes.

There were four pairs of trousers, light blue, dark blue, gray and black, with wide cuffs at the bottoms.

There were six or eight shirts, their colors running the entire spectrum in the most violent shades. There

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

LoneStarPlanetbyH.BeamPiperandJohnJ.McGuireCHAPTERICHAPTERIICHAPTERIIICHAPTERIVCHAPTERVCHAPTERVICHAPTERVIICHAPTERVIIICHAPTERIXCHAPTERXCHAPTERXILoneStarPlanetSFacebooksADivisionofCharterCommunicationsInc.AGROSSET&DUNLAPCOMPANY360ParkAvenueSouthNewYork,NewYork10010LONESTARPLANETCopyright©1958byAceBook...

展开>> 收起<<

H. Beam Piper - Lone Star Planet.pdf

共67页,预览14页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

H. Beam Piper - Lone Star Planet

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: