Forbidden Gold E-Book

L. Ron Hubbard

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

Seitenzahl: 143

Beschreibung

The ancient jungles of the Yucatán hide a world of secrets… the secrets of wealth, love, and fate. Now daredevil pilot Kurt Reid is about to tempt fate and fly into the heart of that jungle in search of his destiny—an adventure as daring and dangerous as any undertaken by Indiana Jones.

He’s looking for gold, but not just any. He’s after one particular nugget—flying blind into a tropical haystack in search of a very valuable needle. Thanks to his grandfather’s vexing dying wish, his entire inheritance—as well as the shape of his future—hangs on the success of his journey.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Kurt soon finds that his family legacy runs deep and dark in the Yucatán. The Mayans mistake Kurt for his grandfather, and they’ve got fifty-years worth of revenge to serve up. Whether he lands on the sacrificial altar or in the arms of his sexy co-pilot Joy, things are bound to heat up fast in pursuit of Forbidden Gold.

In 1931, as a student at George Washington University, Hubbard founded the college Glider Club and within a few months a respected columnist said “he is recognized as one of the outstanding glider pilots in the country.” Later he wrote as the aviation correspondent for the prestigious flying magazine Sportsman Pilot. His combined writing and flying expertise comprised the perfect recipe to give stories like Forbidden Gold their authentic flavor.

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

© 2014 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. Cover art: © 1935 Metropolitan Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Hachette Filipacchi Media.

ISBN 978-1-59212-563-0 EPUB versionISBN 978-1-59212-756-6 Kindle versionISBN 978-1-59212-272-1 print versionISBN 978-1-59212-307-0 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903622

Contents

FOREWORD

FORBIDDEN GOLD

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

STORY PREVIEW

MAN-KILLERS OF THE AIR

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!

Forbidden Gold

Chapter One

THAT’S all you have to do, Mr. Reid. Just match this gold nugget and old Nathan Reid’s money is yours.” Kimmelmeyer looked legally at Kurt Reid and rolled the nugget in question about in his soft, plump hand.

Kurt Reid cocked his head a little on one side and took a long drag at a cigarette. Then he crossed his long legs and exhaled the smoke in a blue cloud which enveloped the desk.

Kimmelmeyer coughed, but his eyes remained very fatherly and legal. Compared to Kurt, Kimmelmeyer was small. Kimmelmeyer’s head was bald, shining as though newly burnished with furniture polish. Kimmelmeyer’s ears were elfinly pointed. His chin was sunk far down in a wing collar, giving his face a half-moon appearance.

“That’s all I have to do,” said Kurt with a twisty grin. “What’s the matter, Kimmelmeyer, don’t you like me any better than Nathan Reid did?”

“Like you?” gaped Kimmelmeyer, missing the point.

“You act as if I were about to go on a Sunday School picnic instead of a gold hunt in Yucatán. What if I don’t want to go, huh?”

The legal look vanished. Kimmelmeyer stared amazed at Kurt. He did not feel at all at ease with this young man. Something in Kurt’s attitude was vaguely insolent. The man’s poise was too astounding. No, Kimmelmeyer did not understand Kurt Reid. They were too many character miles apart. Gangly, good-humored Kurt, on his part, understood Kimmelmeyer a little too well.

“But Mr. Reid!” said Kimmelmeyer. “Have you no sense of proportion at all? Here I have just offered you a chance at four million dollars and a town house and a country house and what do you do? You sit there and ask me foolish questions about whether I like you or not.”

“I knew old Nathan Reid,” said Kurt, dragging at his smoke. “And as certain as I’m his grandson, he didn’t intend to do any good by me through you. Besides, when you’re running through soup and you’re out of gas and you see a landing field, it’s ten to one the thing’s a bog and you’ll get killed anyway.”

“Ai! Don’t be so pessimistic. I thought all pilots were optimists.”

“I’m alive,” said Kurt. “Optimistic pilots are all dead.”

“But what can be wrong? See here, I bring you here at my own expense—”

“At Nathan’s,” corrected Kurt.

“I bring you here to show you the contents of his will and you aren’t even glad about it. He says right here, paragraph three, ‘Whereas, if said Kurt Reid sees fit to match this gold nugget in Yucatán, I designate further that he be given my entire estate.’ Now what you want, eh? You want I should just sign these papers over to you now?”

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said Kurt. “But come along. Let’s stop arguing about this thing. Does he say where this gold is down there in Yucatán?”

“No.”

“Any bet he only gives me a month to find the stuff.”

“That’s right.”

“And he makes no provision for getting me to Yucatán.”

“What you want, eh?” cried Kimmelmeyer. “Can’t you invest a couple thousand in return for four million?”

“Sure, but I haven’t got a penny. Look here.” Kurt raised his brown oxford so that Kimmelmeyer could see the sole. A hole was there, backed by a white piece of paper. “That paper is the letter you sent me,” said Kurt.

“But I thought you had a good job on a transport line, eh?”

“I had one until two weeks ago. I stunted a trimotor when I was feeling good and the company didn’t like it at all. In fact, they fired me. I’m flat and you’ll have to give me the dough to go down there.”

The request was rather sudden. Kimmelmeyer took several seconds to answer. “I … I’m sorry, Mr. Reid, but you see things are sort of slack and I thought …”

“I thought you were so hot to get me down there,” said Kurt.

“Oh, I am! I am! I mean … er … should I not want to see you get all this money instead of hospitals and things maybe?”

“I don’t know what the game is, Kimmelmeyer,” said Kurt, squinting through the smoke, his silver-gray eyes studious. “Old Nathan Reid was my grandfather, yes, but he never liked me. He wanted me to study and follow in his footsteps, but I ran off and learned to fly. Furthermore, I was often sassy and I seem to remember telling him to go to hell once or twice. He never appreciated that, someway.

“He hated me first because I was my father’s son. He hated Dad because Dad went into the Navy and Nathan Reid was once thrown off the president’s chair in Nicaragua by the United States Navy. He’s got me all mixed up.

“Nathan Reid knew he could never get anything on me while he was alive. Now he’s trying to do it after he’s dead. He never had any scruples as a filibuster. He made enemies more than friends. After his Central American misadventures he tried to run everything by the same yardstick.

“You’re just his mouthpiece, that’s all. You don’t know these things. I do. Nathan Reid wants to see me dead and I know damned well that a trap is waiting for me in Yucatán if I go down there looking for this gold. That pretty nugget you’ve got there still retains some of its quartz. That’s rose quartz. The ledge is jewelry rock. Oh, I know my gold mining. If it’s there, I can find it. Give me time.

“But here’s something that you’ve never heard about. There’s a saying about Yucatán and gold. The fact is known all around the Caribbean. You can look for gold in Yucatán. Gold comes out of Yucatán, brought by the Indians there. But no white man that ever found gold in Yucatán ever got out alive except filibuster Nathan Reid.”

“My God,” whispered Kimmelmeyer.

“Nathan Reid hated me and now that he’s dead he’s trying to kill me. He knew that I’d go, and I’m going. I’m broke, but I’ll make it someway. I know where he traveled in Yucatán. Somehow I’ll get a plane and fly over his old routes there until I find the place. I’m going to beat him at his own game.”

The finality and earnestness of Kurt’s last remark jarred Kimmelmeyer. In many ways, Kurt was like Nathan Reid. There was a certain positiveness about him, a certain gleam to his silver-gray eyes, a certain set to his lean, almost swarthy face.

Kimmelmeyer nodded. He had dropped the gold nugget on the polished surface of his desk. He had dropped it as though it had been hot. Kurt picked it up, studied it and handed it back.

Kurt stood up. “I’m going now. In a month—on the eighth of October—I’ll be back here with a mate for that gold.”

“Wait, wait,” said Kimmelmeyer, once more efficient and legal. For a moment he had been transported to the seared plains of Yucatán, but now he was right back in New York with a solid chair under him, a newspaper and a big dinner waiting for him in an hour or two.

Kimmelmeyer picked up a copy of the Eastern Pilot, opened it and handed it to Kurt. “I was looking for your address and I got a copy of this,” said Kimmelmeyer. “Look here, I just thought …”

Kurt read the advertisement in its neat little box. It said:

WANTED: A transport pilot, a radio operator and a mechanic for long flight. Two planes will be used, the duration of the trip will be six weeks or thereabouts. Destination: Yucatán.

Kimmelmeyer was eager, “There’s your chance.”

Kurt studied the man, grinned a little and then nodded. “Yes, here’s my chance.” He stuffed the magazine into the pocket of his tweed jacket and went out, slamming the door behind him.

Kimmelmeyer mopped his forehead and muttered, “Ai, but that was easy. Easy!”

Chapter Two

KURT went to the address mentioned in the advertisement. The place was on First Avenue, close under the El. Shabbily dressed, sad-faced people loitered on the doorsteps, their voices drowned in the surflike roar of the El. Children scrambled in the gutters, pinch-faced and ragged. A huckster bawled a string of indefinite syllables in an assured tone and clanged his brass bell.

Kurt felt ill at ease, anxious to be away. People turned and looked at him as he passed. He did not belong here. He felt a sullen ill will toward him.

The door which bore the right number was painted green, sandwiched between a fruit stand and a scrap iron shop. A sign creaked overhead in the hot wind stating that apartments were to be had there by the day, the week or the month.