Mister Tidwell Gunner E-Book

L. Ron Hubbard

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Historical Fiction Short Stories Collection
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 155

Beschreibung

Mister Tidwell is a scholarly Oxford professor—snatched out of his bookish world and pressed into service aboard Lord Nelson’s legendary British fleet. Such is the life of Mister Tidwell, Gunner. The professor is about to get an object lesson in war, self-reliance ... and survival. Overwhelmed by the smell of gunpowder, the sound of cannons, and the sight of death, he will either experience the sweet taste of victory or the bitter taste of his own blood. Sail into history and into battle as Mister Tidwell, Gunner takes you into the heart of one of the greatest wars for dominance of the seas.

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. Mister Tidwell, Gunner story illustration and Story Preview illustration from Argosy Magazine and cover art from Adventure Magazine and are © 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-59212-596-8 EPUB versionISBN 978-1-59212-773-3 Kindle versionISBN 978-1-59212-397-1 print versionISBN 978-1-59212-406-0 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927525

Contents

FOREWORD

MISTER TIDWELL, GUNNER

SUBMARINE

THE DROWNED CITY

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

STORY PREVIEW

UNDER THE BLACK ENSIGN

L. RON HUBBARD IN THEGOLDEN AGE OF PULP FICTION

THE STORIES FROM THE GOLDEN 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!

Mister Tidwell,Gunner

Mister Tidwell, Gunner

MISTER TIDWELL looked very calm standing there against the rail of the Swiftsure, but his outward appearance was no indication of the volcanic fires of loathing which seethed behind his small eyeglasses and bubbled beneath his gray frock coat.

Had anyone on the Swiftsure been told about those fires, he would have laughed heartily and long in the honest fashion of a Royal Navy tar.

The nub of Mister Tidwell’s grievance was this. Here in the midst of rolling drums and clamorous trumpets which called to quarters, his purpose was lost. In a moment, if he did not like a taste of the cat, he would have to go below, far below into the evil smelling cockpit where the surgeon and his assistants were even now preparing for the toll.

The French man-o’-war had grown into a white sail mountain out of the Mediterranean blue, a bone in her teeth, looking like a mad dog frothing at the mouth, abristle with seventy-four naval cannon.

This, the high tide of the Napoleonic Wars, was the year 1798. Horatio Nelson, that quaint, efficient little man, was back on the sea, his right sleeve empty, his cheeks sunken with the effects of nine months of suffering in England.

The hot summer days were filled with ugly misgivings. England, her Continental Alliance split apart, was suffering a dark day. And Nelson, the poor devil, was about to become the butt of a political fiasco solely because Boney’s fleet had left Toulon for parts unknown and because Nelson, dismasted in a gale, had been unable to track the French across the trackless sea.

The whole, vibrant problem amounted to one question. Where were the French?

Alexandria? No, Nelson had called in. Asia Minor? No! Syracuse? No!

And here, rising like a ghost out of the seas came a French man-o’-war ready to do battle, nay, anxious to fight. The whereabouts of Boney’s fleet must be muted at all costs. The French must take India. They must drive England out of the Mediterranean.

And the Swiftsure, all alone in the lazy blue expanse, girded the loins of her fighting men and prepared to deal iron in grape and canister doses.

And Mister Tidwell, pushed back and forth by hurrying gun crews and anxious Marines, gazed somberly at the approaching vessel and murmured a wish that he might be able to witness just one engagement in the light and air.

Two midshipmen, gold lace stiff and militant, scrambled up on the bulwark, small swords clanking, and began their ascent into the shrouds.

Mister Tidwell watched them go. Harvey and Sloan. Twelve years old, future officers, two of an uncontrollable band of twenty-four who harassed officers and men and Mister Tidwell without mercy.

Especially Mister Tidwell. He was their schoolmaster.

The crack brained idea which sent young men of twelve to sea, fostered in the dim past by King Charles, who thought his navy needed officers trained from infancy, had only been capped by another king’s thought that these urchins should have the benefits of schooling at the hands of a trained master.

Mister Tidwell, along with several score of well-meaning professors, had long suffered the effects of those laws.

The small pay and the arduous life offered little attraction to any man of the day, much less a learned gentleman, and so His Majesty had been forced to conceive a stratagem which was nothing more than literary press ganging.

Two years before Mister Tidwell had written a paper. A mild, well worded paper, which dealt with the tax system. For that he had been sent to sea. And here he was, standing in the Swiftsure’s scuppers, watching battle approach, knowing that he was even now late for the cockpit.

Marines swarmed up the ratlines, white crossbelts shimmering, muskets clenched, faces strained as they took their posts in the crosstrees. Mister Tidwell envied those Marines. Their sole duty consisted of taking pot shots at Marines in the rigging of the French ships, and what if they did die? They at least stayed out in the sun and air.

The long and short of Mister Tidwell’s aversion to answering that call to quarters was blood.

A horizontal plume of smoke rapped out from the Frenchman’s bow chasers. Round shot smashed solidly into the rail. Splinters sang like shrapnel. Two sailors clutched their lacerated faces and leaned sickly against their guns. One of them looked at the maw of the hatch from whence came a stream of powder monkeys bearing their leathern buckets. He looked away again and strove to staunch the flow of blood with his white cotton shirt. No, that gunner certainly did not want to go below to the hospital.

The Frenchman was a quarter of a mile away, swinging into position for a broadside. On the Swiftsure, drums still rolled and trumpets blared, filling Mister Tidwell with uneasiness.

Gun captains blew on their matches. A twenty-four pounder spurted flame from muzzle and touchhole, leaped up and slammed back on the deck, splintering a wooden wheel. The shot sang through the Frenchman’s rigging.

The broadside smashed out, enveloping the entire enemy ship with smoke. Sails and spars rained on the Swiftsure’s deck. A Marine came down like a shot tropical bird, hitting the planks solidly to roll over on his face. An officer leaned over him for a moment, hand pressed against the crimsoning crossbelts, and then jerked his thumb toward the rail. The Marine was thrown over the side.

Lucky, thought Mister Tidwell. The man hadn’t lived to see the cockpit in action.

A hand fell on Tidwell’s shoulder. A petty officer, face contorted with excitement and anger, shook the gray coat and sent Mister Tidwell hurtling toward the hatch.

A midshipman, holding a musket bigger than he was, paused in his ascent up a ratline long enough to grin. Mister Tidwell reproved the boy with a glance and then went below.

No one paid any attention to him on the second gun deck. The cannon had begun to fire, bucking out of line, filling the place with choking fumes. Mister Tidwell paused for a moment, reluctant to go below again. He saw the sweating torsos of the gunners through the dim welter of round shot, flying splinters, gashed beams and exploding guns.

He sighed, and then shrugging his small shoulders inside his gray frock coat, he adjusted his eye glasses and went down another ladder to the third gun deck.

The stream of black powder monkeys and their black cargoes choked the passageway for a moment. Mister Tidwell stood aside to let them by. Powder was strewn all over the planking. One match would finish the ship. It was ever thus.

Mister Tidwell went aft, ducking his head to avoid the beams. A tall man was forced to take to his hands and knees through this passageway. The cockpit was ahead.

A great lantern filled with sputtering candles burned against the beams. The midshipmen slept here when things were peaceful. Now the midshipmen’s chests had been drawn together to make a low table. A piece of tarpaulin, already black with blood, was spread over the surface.

The surgeon, a tall, gaunt impassive gentleman, stood over a small stove heating his saws and knives and soldering irons. His assistants were placing buckets all about the improvised table, making ready for the men soon to come.

This was Mister Tidwell’s battle station. Here he was no longer schoolmaster to the midshipmen, he was part of the surgeon’s machine.

“About time,” muttered an assistant. “Peel off that coat. Hear those guns? They’ll be coming down here soon.”

Mister Tidwell peeled off the gray coat, folded it up and placed it in the corner. He felt nauseated already. The smell of the bilge, mixed with powder smoke, stale food, dirty clothes and dried blood was already affecting him.

The cannons barked overhead. Their wheels roared across the upper decks in constant discord. The Swiftsure lurched and rolled under the impacts of recoil and canister, by courtesy of the French.

Mister Tidwell felt some interest in the guns. He had devoted considerable time and much mathematics to the study of ordnance. He felt no interest at all in surgery. But he rolled up his sleeves, squinted his eyes through the bad light and waited nervously for things to happen.

The first victim was a brawny lad, carried between two sailors. The man’s eyes were narrow with pain and his mouth was set. His leg was mangled at the thigh. He lived only through grace of a tight tourniquet.

Mister Tidwell knew his duty. He picked up a bottle of rum and shoved the mouth between the brawny lad’s teeth. He let the fluid gurgle until the surgeon, in an impassive voice, said, “That’s enough. We’ll need some for the others.”

Thereupon, Mister Tidwell and three assistants seized the man, threw him upon the low table and the surgeon went to work. Mister Tidwell placed a wooden peg in the victim’s mouth so that he would not break his teeth.

The surgeon, with a heated knife, slashed the flesh away from the bone in one swift, semi-circular slash. He snatched up the saw and went through the living bone.

The mangled limb was thrown into a bucket, the stump was swiftly wrapped, the brawny lad, eyes wild with agony, ceased to struggle in the grip of the assistants. He was thrown to one side.

Mister Tidwell looked behind him. The men were piling up like cord wood against the bulkhead. Rifle wounds, splinters, charred faces from flarebacks, smashed hands, crushed arms … Mister Tidwell swallowed hard and selected the next victim.

This was a bullet hole in the chest. The surgeon waived aside the rum. This was not a serious operation. A soldering iron was taken from the stove. Mister Tidwell and the assistants had to hold hard to keep the victim still. The iron was plunged deep in the wound.

With a tremor, the sailor laid very still. Blood was frothing out of his mouth.

“He’s dead,” said the surgeon, and motioned for the man to be cast aside.

The work went on. The buckets were growing full. Blood dripped slowly to the floor and ran in rivulets toward the bulkheads.