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    The Mercenaries
    The Mercenaries
    The Mercenaries
    Ebook59 pages42 minutes

    The Mercenaries

    By H. Beam Piper

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJul 1, 2010
    The Mercenaries

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      Book preview

      The Mercenaries - H. Beam Piper

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Mercenaries, by Henry Beam Piper, Illustrated by Brush

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Mercenaries

      Author: Henry Beam Piper

      Release Date: July 12, 2006 [eBook #18814]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MERCENARIES***

      E-text prepared by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan,

      and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

      (http://www.pgdp.net/)

      Transcriber's note:

      This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction, March, 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.

      THE MERCENARIES

      BY H. BEAM PIPER

      Illustrated by Brush

      Once, wars were won by maneuvering hired fighting men; now wars are different—and the hired experts are different. But the human problems remain!

      Duncan MacLeod hung up the suit he had taken off, and sealed his shirt, socks and underwear in a laundry envelope bearing his name and identity-number, tossing this into one of the wire baskets provided for the purpose. Then, naked except for the plastic identity disk around his neck, he went over to the desk, turned in his locker key, and passed into the big room beyond.

      Four or five young men, probably soldiers on their way to town, were coming through from the other side. Like MacLeod, they wore only the plastic disks they had received in exchange for the metal ones they wore inside the reservation, and they were being searched by attendants who combed through their hair, probed into ears and nostrils, peered into mouths with tiny searchlights, and employed a variety of magnetic and electronic detectors.

      To this search MacLeod submitted wearily. He had become quite a connoisseur of security measures in fifteen years' research and development work for a dozen different nations, but the Tonto Basin Research Establishment of the Philadelphia Project exceeded anything he had seen before. There were gray-haired veterans of the old Manhattan Project here, men who had worked with Fermi at Chicago, or with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, twenty years before, and they swore in amused exasperation when they thought of how the relatively mild regulations of those days had irked them. And yet, the very existence of the Manhattan Project had been kept a secret from all but those engaged in it, and its purpose from most of them. Today, in 1965, there might have been a few wandering tribesmen in Somaliland or the Kirghiz Steppes who had never heard of the Western Union's Philadelphia Project, or of the Fourth Komintern's Red Triumph Five-Year Plan, or of the Islamic Kaliphate's Al-Borak Undertaking, or of the Ibero-American Confederation's Cavor Project, but every literate person in the world knew that the four great power-blocs were racing desperately to launch the first spaceship to reach the Moon and build the Lunar fortress that would insure world supremacy.

      He turned in the nonmagnetic identity disk at the desk on the other side of the search room, receiving the metal one he wore inside the reservation, and with it the key to his inside locker. He put on the clothes he had left behind when he had passed out, and filled his pockets with the miscellany of small articles he had not been allowed to carry off the reservation.

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