Arctic Wings E-Book

L. Ron Hubbard

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Action Adventure Short Stories Collection
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 128

Beschreibung

Spring has come to White Bear Landing—and so has the law, in the hands of Royal Mounted policeman Bob Dixon. More than once Dixon has meted out justice with hard fists and hot lead, but now the tables have turned. He’s been set up as a murder suspect. Dixon’s only hope is to let the trust of a good friend and the love of a good woman lead the way to true justice and redemption—on Arctic Wings.

Leseprobe

SELECTED FICTION WORKSBY 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’snovellas 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

© 2013 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. Story Preview illustration: Argosy Magazine is © 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-59212-480-0 EPUB versionISBN 978-1-59212-734-4 Kindle versionISBN 978-1-59212-255-4 print versionISBN 978-1-59212-234-9 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903617

Contents

FOREWORD

ARCTIC WINGS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

STORY PREVIEW

FORBIDDEN GOLD

L. RON HUBBARD IN THEGOLDEN AGE OFPULP FICTION

THE STORIES FROM THEGOLDEN AGE

GLOSSARY

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!

Arctic Wings

Chapter One

SPRING had come to White Bear Landing and for three days the Tokush River, which emptied into the lake and poured forth again, had clogged the waters with broken trees and brush.

But this was not the only flotsam which the Tokush brought out of the unmapped, white reaches of the Arctic. Spring brought back the game, and following the game came the carnivores, the wolves and Taggart.

The lake was blue as the sky, and the trees were green, and a crystal sweetness was in the air, and on the porch of the White Bear Post stood Nancy McClane watching the great Vs of geese going north overhead, watching the patterns the clouds made in the water and drinking of the crystal air.

Another winter had gone and though summer meant hard work, it was good to be alive just now. To be free and young and alive in the Far North. Work would begin within the week, but now there was rest and it was spring.

Soon the planes would start winging south, winging north, sluggish in the air with cargoes of pitchblende and payrolls and machinery as the mining of radium went into full swing. And White Bear Landing was the halfway mark between the Arctic mines and civilization. Soon the lake would be struck and slashed by pontoon and slipstream and the thunder of mighty engines would become so monotonous that only its absence would be unusual.

Man was conquering the Arctic by air and White Bear Landing was only one of a hundred outposts, forgotten eight months of the year.

It was hard work but Nancy found a certain peace in it. This was her country and that of her father and now it was all she had—though she smiled to herself at the thought of possessing so vast a region.

Men grew harsh in their battle with snow and scowling forests, but few men had ever shown her discourtesy. If Taggart had not come down early that spring, she would never have had a passing doubt of her own safety here, though she was but a girl alone.

Taggart came. Three half-breeds in a long canoe, with Taggart hunched like the Russian Bear amidships, hungrily looking toward the landing and the post and store back of it. Log houses all, but they were something more than wilderness though something less than civilization.

Nancy did not know Taggart and she did not withdraw. She stood on the porch and watched the canoe ground in the sand.

Taggart got out. He was a tower of bone and sinew and his checkered shirt was plastered tight to his muscular chest by sweat and spray. His beard had grown carelessly to mat over his coarse face and his eyes seemed to use the hair for cover.

Taggart had strength and he also had brains. But a lifetime of hard boom camps and the early discovery that brawn made law and brains made money had thrown Taggart into rough contact with the police too often for him not to have gained a reputation for badness.

He swaggered up the beach, looking at Nancy. He had not seen a woman for a year and a half, but even if this had not been the case, a sight of Nancy McClane made most men stop.

She was dressed in a calico shirt and a buckskin riding skirt and wore beaded moccasins made by the Crees. But she had been educated in a school most women name with awe and the stamp of it showed through this wilderness dress. There was a way her hair radiated the sunlight again, a way she looked and smiled and the proud carriage of her. She was beautiful even in the cities and in the north, men found it difficult to believe their eyes.

Taggart came to a stop below the porch. His coat was over his arm and a big Colt stuck out at an angle from his hip. Insolently he looked her up and down and then grinned happily.

“Where’s Durant?” said Taggart.

She was uneasy before this man as the slightest glance would have told anyone that here was a bully of the camps, a man without principle and ready to break the code. But she looked at him frankly. “He’s gone up the lake to try the fishing. He’ll be back in an hour.”

“Yeah?” said Taggart. “I think you’re lying. Never mind, shove a couple quarts out to these breeds and give me something good. No trade liquor for mine. I’ve got pound notes aplenty.”

She went into the post, treading lightly over the bare boards and outwardly unconcerned. But she eyed the rifle rack with longing just the same.

She gave out the two quarts and then a bottle of Hudson’s Bay Scotch to Taggart.

He was making a show for her benefit. He cracked off the top by hitting it against the fireplace and then drank around the jagged glass. He drank loudly and with great pleasure and when he was done the bottle was dry. He threw it into the fireplace.

“Gimme another,” said Taggart. “I got pound notes enough to buy out the King, damn his soul. Huh, you ain’t shocked! Must be a Yank.”

She gave him another quart and took his pound notes and gave him change and then, very gently, she pointed to the sign above the blanket racks, “No drinking inside this post. Durant, Factor, White Bear Landing, Hudson’s Bay Company.”

Taggart chuckled and cracked the head off the bottle and drank again.

Slowly Nancy moved up the counter to the place Durant kept his Webley, watching Taggart the while. But the gun was not there and she suddenly remembered that Durant had taken it when he had left to bring in a trapper who had sent word for help. Durant would not be back for two days.

“Gimme another,” said Taggart. “I’m dry. I ain’t wet my whistle for a year and a half and I could hold a keg.”

“Obviously,” said Nancy, “but I don’t think you had better try. Durant will be back any moment.”

“Bah,” said Taggart, “I got eyes. Your canoe house hasn’t been opened since the ice broke. Look, I ain’t a bad guy, sister …’’

He edged slowly around the counter. “I’m tough but I ain’t bad. I’m Taggart. Ask anybody and they’ll tell you who Taggart is.”

Nancy backed away. The gun racks were five paces to her right and she moved slowly in that direction.

Taggart took two quick steps and was between her and the guns. “Look, sweetheart, who’s to know? I’m Taggart and I’m tough, but I ain’t bad. You’re the best lookin’—”

Suddenly she stopped and laughed at him. She tossed her brown hair back out of her eyes and her mirth was very real.

“That’s better,” said Taggart.

“Is it?” said Nancy. “Listen.”

There was a far-off drumming which was growing gradually in the still air. Nancy laughed again. “That’s a police plane, Mr. Taggart.”