All Frontiers Are Jealous, page 1
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.
Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. 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 978-1-59212-733-7 Mobipocket version
ISBN 978-1-59212-474-9 ePub version
ISBN 978-1-59212-254-7 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-338-4 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903546
Contents
FOREWORD
ALL FRONTIERS ARE JEALOUS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
STORY PREVIEW:
THE HEADHUNTERS
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!
All Frontiers Are Jealous
Chapter One
A few months ago there appeared in the London Times a financial notice. The bankers saw nothing unusual about it. The public paid it little heed. Investors shied. A few brokers smiled. Only a few knew the undiluted hell which backed those dry, crisp lines.
SUDAN RAILWAY
TRIED AGAIN
Colonel Malone Asks Aid in
Long-Abandoned Project
Mombasa, Kenya, EEA, March 6 (RS)—Rumors of yet another effort to link the Uganda Railway with the Anglo-Egyptian Railroad were confirmed here by Colonel B. A. Malone, well-known promoter.
Investors will remember the disaster of former ventures when all attempts to survey the line failed.
Colonel Malone, according to his statement, will utilize a short franchise granted him to survey the line. He will attempt to float a loan on the London market.
The only memorandum made concerning this item was handed out to outer-office clerks and read, “No matter what price offered, we are not to be bothered with SR bonds.”
However, down in Mombasa and shortly in Nairobi, Colonel Malone grew expansive and hopeful as always. Optimism sprouted from him like green bamboo shoots. He had won and lost half a dozen fortunes but no incident in his life had ever dimmed his winning, if gold-plated smile.
Railroads made money. Colonel Malone made railroads. He had shot his quota of lions at Tsavo. He had sunk his pick into the clay of Tanganyika. He could wave his hand at a map and truthfully say that the thing would be a blank if he hadn’t helped matters with railroads.
And, that hot and depressing afternoon, when he alighted at Nairobi in company with a weather-beaten young giant, he ran true to form by saying:
“When I first saw this place, Dan, it was ten mud huts and a sheet-iron shed. Look at it now! Modern. Electric lights! Streets. A post office! We did that with the Uganda Railway. She’s a beaut, isn’t she, what?”
Dan Courtney glanced at the stubby, woodburning engine which was panting wearily after its run. He listened for a moment to the yapping roar of the natives in third class.
“Yeah,” said Dan Courtney, “she’s a beaut.”
“And the first thing you know,” said Colonel Malone, “the fetid green of jungle and the golden sands of desert will be caressed with the steel highway into the north. Think of it, Dan!”
“Yeah,” said Dan. He raised his khaki sun hat and mopped at his brow and gazed longingly down the blazing street at a veranda which looked cool.
“In chains,” whispered Malone, ecstatically. “Like a mighty beast, the Dark Continent growls and snarls at us, but within the decade the last link between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean will be welded. Progress, Dan, what?”
“Yeah. But I’m not in the market for stock in it. Let’s get us a drink of lemon pop or something.”
Malone’s smile grew sad. “You’ve no imagination, Dan. No imagination. But then . . . no American ever had an imagination. Leave that and empire to the British, what?”
“Lemonade,” persisted the weathered giant. “I got to work the rest of the day.”
“Look here,” said Malone, “you’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
Dan looked down at the heat waves which shivered off the concrete around his scorched boots and grinned.
“You’re not going to back out, are you? Look here, Dan, you can’t do that! Just because those damned Dinkas murdered Stephans and slaughtered Lawry’s men. . . . You wouldn’t let that stop you, would you, Dan?”
“Who said anything about quitting? A job is a job. I’ve got to stretch a line from Lake Salisbury and the Uganda to the Anglo-Egyptian at Sennar across the Sudan. I’ve got to review Lawry’s work and confirm his passes and grades and take a blank out of the map in the Dinka country. For that I get three hundred bucks a month and five hundred in stock. It’s a job. Let’s find some lemonade.”
They turned toward the street, starting to thrust their way through the press of natives about the station. But they did not get very far. Two white men of burly build stood in the way and seemed to have heard Dan’s last remark. One was short and wide, the other was tall and wide. This last had a narrow head on which two very small, pointed ears were set. One of these ears was half gone. The smaller one’s nose took up twice as much territory as it should have and his eyes took up only half their allotted space.
“If it ain’t Malone,” said the bigger man.
The colonel’s pleasant expression hardened like concrete. “Hello, Gotch-ear. I see the local authorities are asleep as usual.”
“He kids all the time just like that, Bart,” said Gotch-ear to his short friend. “Did I hear Salisbury to Sennar, Malone?”
“That missing chunk don’t seem to hurt your hearing any,” growled the colonel.
“This tall boy making a safari up by Alak?” persisted Gotch-ear.
“I’ll take a safari over your frame if you don’t get out of my way,” snapped the colonel.
“You wouldn’t be thinking of tagging us, would you, big guy?”
“I pick clean trail when I travel, whatever-the-hell-your-name-is,” said Dan.
“A Yank,” said Gotch-ear. “Listen, big guy, keep your eye on your transit up north. I don’t take nothin’ from punks, see? And if this is one of your sneaks, Malone, we’ll send you back your pal’s head in a big wicker basket.”
Gotch-ear and Bart moved off into the swarm of natives and were lost. Dan, with a singleness of purpose which was very characteristic of him, headed for the veranda and the cold drink.
“I fired him off the South African road,” explained Malone. “He was stealing supplies and selling them. Wonder what the hell he’s doing in Nairobi.”
“From his looks, it isn’t legal,” said Dan. “He’s jittery.”
“Must be important. Gotch-ear’s got a nose for money. Wonder why he made a point of heading you off.”
“Jittery, that’s all,” said Dan. “Forget it. Northern Uganda is big enough for a dozen Gotch-ears.”
“I wonder if he’s being paid to block this road,” puzzled Malone, trying to keep up with Dan’s long stride and half running to do it in spite of the heat.
“Nuts,” said Dan. “All you need is this survey, the franchise and the cash. You’ll have the first two and you’ll get the third, won’t you?”
“The cash?” blinked Malone. “Oh . . . oh yes, of course. Sure I’ll get it. I’ll float a bond issue on the London market. Sure, that’s easy. They’ll snap up the SR paper like it was printed on platinum.”
A tall and dignified native stepped out from the questionable shade of a warehouse and accosted Dan with great ceremony.
“You look well, bwana.”
“Hello, Petey,” said Dan. “Been having good luck?”
“No, bwana.”
“Maybe I’ll change it for you. Scout out and round up the boys you wired me you had. We scurry out of here this afternoon.”
“Yes, bwana,” said Petey, withdrawing with another bow.
Dan slid into a chair beside a veranda table, pulled off his helmet and fanned lazily at his moist face.
“As soon as I get the equipment together,” said Dan, presently, “I’ll take that train to the end of the line at Soroti. I want to be well into the country when the rains start.”
“You bet you do,” said Malone. “You’ve got eight months to run the line and that’s not half enough time. My . . . er . . . ah . . . franchise runs out at that time, you know.”
“The bonus of two grand still sticks?”
“Of course. Africa . . .”
Dan didn’t listen to the colonel. His attention had been distracted by a very soft and lovely voice at the next table. He squared around slightly, and instantly the lazy boredom froze on his face.
He did not know the girl, but he knew he would very shortly. He had never seen his destiny so plain before him.
His blue gaze intently surveyed her as though he was topographing a range of hills.
She had a sun helmet on the back of her head and blond, damp curls were escaping from under the band. She had a very serious look on her face as well as three spots of lead smudge, deposited by a habit of biting worriedly at her pencil with small white teeth.
She wore a shooting jacket unbuttoned at the throat, a khaki walking skirt and a pair of battered sixteen-inch laced boots, one of which bobbed back and forth displaying a sole which looked too small to be believed.
