The Bold Dare All E-Book

L. Ron Hubbard

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

Seitenzahl: 130

Beschreibung

As brash and bold and daring as Steve McQueen, Lieutenant Lee Briscoe will never back away from a good cause or good fight. And when it comes to heroism, he and McQueen are in the same band of brothers.

Briscoe’s gone undercover to infiltrate a slave-labor camp on an island in Southeast Asia, knowing full well that once he goes in, he may never get out. Posing as a man on the run for murder, he may soon wish he had run in the opposite direction. His adversary on the island is Schwenk—a man who is not only a connoisseur of cruelty, but an expert at delivering it.

And for Briscoe, the stakes have just shot up. An innocent young woman has landed on the island and fallen into Schwenk’s clutches, sold to him to do with her as he pleases. Escape is the only option . . . or both Briscoe and the girl are sure to face a fate worse than death.

L. Ron Hubbard once wrote in his journal: “There must be wide spaces in which to think, strange music to hear, odd costumes to see and the elements to battle against. Money, nice cars, good food and a ‘good job’ mean nothing to me when compared to being able to possess the thought that there is a surprise over the horizon.” Venturing toward that horizon, at age seventeen Ron set sail for the South Pacific in July 1927, and after spending time getting to know the local natives, he signed aboard a working schooner bound for China’s coast. Along the way, Ron encountered many dangers lurking in the thick jungle mists—firsthand experience that contributed to stories like The Bold Dare All.

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.

Story Preview cover art: © 1936 Metropolitan Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Hachette Filipacchi Media. 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 978-1-59212-493-0 EPUB versionISBN 978-1-59212-740-5 Kindle versionISBN 978-1-59212-306-3 print versionISBN 978-1-59212-266-0 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903620

Contents

FOREWORD

THE BOLD DARE ALL

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

STORY PREVIEW

FIFTY-FIFTY O’BRIEN

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!

The Bold Dare All

CHAPTER ONE

Defiance to Timba’s Ruler

THE sinuous length of the blacksnake whip threshed like a snake in agony upon the blazing coral sand.

Back and forth, back and forth, it left a crazy pattern of arcs and wiped out the prints of naked feet.

Eyes followed the lash, back and forth, as though the whip really was a snake with the powers of hypnotism.

High above the tatterdemalion crowd the spinning sun whipped down its quivers of molten arrows.

Palm fronds drooped in the windless heat. Where the sea plumed up from the outer reef rose lazy, rainbowed steam. Beyond lay the Celebes Sea, a glazed, heat-polished metallic sheet of scorching blue.

Inland loomed the mountains. Festering green tangles spread over the rough and jagged slopes like scum left by a receding tide.

The miserable huts along the shore crouched among the crawling vines, trying to hide their scaly thatch and blistered boards. From the horizon to the peaks, everything was harsh, brutal and ugly.

The men who stood in awful fascination were clad in tatters or not clad at all. Upon their gaunt and wasted features were stamped the hard-living histories of their lives.

Like the bleached bones of the sailing ship which rotted upon the coral sand, these men had been cast up by the sea and the sea did not want them back.

No one wanted them but Schwenk, and Schwenk wanted nothing but their physical abilities. He wanted their hands and their backs and he took them and broke them as he pleased. Schwenk needed them because he needed copra.

The blacksnake whip was still lashing, making a hissing sound as it moved. A hand, copper-plated by the sun, horny with work, battered with fighting, gripped the leather-sewn butt. The nails were dirty; the back of the hand was hairy.

Above the thick forearm clung a sweat-grimed sleeve. The throat of the shirt was ripped back, exposing a long, livid scar which was the handiwork of a certain native who had gone mad.

A native would have to be mad to attack Schwenk. This one was long ago cured of his mental disease. Buried to the ears in sand, honey smeared over his features, he had been abandoned to a tribe of ants who had mandibles sharp enough to go through ironwood.

Everyone was watching that whip. Schwenk’s gloating eyes caressed the writhing length, up and down, up and down, measuring it with a blood-freezing expertness born of long, long practice.

Schwenk thrust his black tongue between his broken black teeth and moistened his lipless mouth. The bloated circle of his face lighted up. His flawless blue, bitterly cold killer eyes shifted suddenly to the back of the man.

The native moaned helplessly. His brown eyes were still on that moving lash. His hands were suspended high over his head, wrists lashed together, making his back muscles bulge beneath the chocolate-colored satin of his skin. He shivered.

Schwenk dug his heels into the white sand. He bent his body forward, dragged the lash back to its full ten feet of length.

Sssst! Crack!

Blood burbled up through the torn flesh and glistened in the sunlight.

Sssst! Crack!

The man screamed.

Sssst! Crack!

The crisscross pattern grew more complex and then began to blur. In a matter of seconds chunks of flesh were squared out and turned around and left dangling by small bits of skin.

It was impossible to see any pattern now. Only a dripping, red mass. Flies were swarming in upon it, leaping up and out of the way each time the whip struck, settling back when the lash drew away.

The natives in the crowd were staring and shaking. The two dozen white derelicts looked on unaffected.

But on the edge of the throng stood a man apart. He was not watching the lash. He was watching Schwenk with disdainful eyes, studying the hot satisfaction which blazed upon Schwenk’s face at each crack of the whip.

Lee Briscoe had only been on Timba for two months. He had not yet had time to become a ragged scarecrow. He still pipe-clayed his helmet, he still polished his well-cut boots, he was still particular about the way his khaki breeches and shirts were starched.

The crowd knew nothing about him but they whispered that he was wanted by the law. No man would work for Schwenk of his own free will. Others held that Lee Briscoe had been an Army lieutenant and had murdered a soldier. But not one held the real clue as to why the man had chosen hellhole Timba for a retreat.

Lee Briscoe’s eyes were clear and gray. His face was darkly burned. His cheekbones were high and prominent and his jaw was lean and firm. He was built wide at the shoulders and tapered off from there like a boxer.

Schwenk was beginning to sweat at his work, but that did not curtail his enjoyment of it in the least. He was just getting into good form when Lee Briscoe stepped into the clear space behind him and snatched the lash as it swung back.

Lee Briscoe threw the blacksnake thirty feet down toward the water, but he did not watch it go as the others did. He was looking straight at Schwenk.

Schwenk turned slowly. He looked at the tips of Briscoe’s boots and then at the crown of Briscoe’s helmet. Casually, not in the least excited, Schwenk put his hand on the heavy butt of his belted revolver.

“You got anything to say about it?” said Schwenk, carelessly. “Maybe you just forgot yourself. Maybe somebody told you I liked to be interrupted. That it?”

Lee Briscoe’s words came slowly, with a drawl. “There isn’t any reason to kill him. Finky was a good man.”

“He’s a thief,” said Schwenk. “I’ve got five hundred natives on Timba. If they start stealing …”

“Finky wouldn’t have stolen anything if you’d feed good rations. He was hungry. All he took was a can of salmon and a half-dozen biscuits. If he’d killed his partner, you wouldn’t have had a word to say. That isn’t justice, Schwenk.”

Schwenk sneered at Briscoe, turned and barked at the men: “He’s taking over the island, boys. Tip your hats to him. I said, tip your hats!”

Uneasily, the two dozen derelicts touched their fingers to their battered helmets and straws.

Schwenk faced Briscoe again, lipless mouth curling into a ghastly grin. “Now is there anything else you want, Briscoe? Maybe a Scotch and soda? WONG! Bring Briscoe a Scotch and soda!”

There came a full minute’s silence and then Wong, opium-drugged, slant-eyed servant to Schwenk, came forth with the order on a tray.

“Drink it up,” said Schwenk, hand on the butt of his gun. “Drink it up, Mr. Briscoe, because that’s the last time you’re ever going to drink anything on this earth. I’m going to murder you, Briscoe. Right here. And murder isn’t pleasant. Here, don’t mind me, drink up!”

Briscoe looked levelly at Schwenk and knew that the man meant every word he said. No man but Schwenk could carry a gun on Timba—except when the natives staged one of their frequent revolts.