Conquest Over Time
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Michael Shaara
Michael Shaara (1928-88) was an American writer of science, sports and historical fiction. He served in the Korean War, was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University. The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.
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Conquest Over Time - Michael Shaara
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Conquest Over Time, by Michael Shaara
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: Conquest Over Time
Author: Michael Shaara
Release Date: March 15, 2010 [EBook #31652]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONQUEST OVER TIME ***
Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe November 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Now this here planet,
he said cautiously, is whacky in a lot of ways. First of all they call it Mert. Just plain Mert. And they live in houses strictly from Dickens, all carriages, no sewers, narrow streets, stuff like that.
But that wasn't all.... Travis, in reaching Diomed III before any others, found himself waging a one-man fight against more than this; he was bucking the strangest way of life you have ever heard of!
conquest over time
by ... Michael Shaara
What was the startling secret of Diomed III that almost caused Travis to lose his life?
And who was Lappy?...
When the radiogram came in it was 10:28 ship's time and old 29 was exactly 3.4 light years away from Diomed III. Travis threw her wide open and hoped for the best. By 4:10 that same afternoon, minus three burned out generators and fronting a warped ion screen, old 29 touched the atmosphere and began homing down. It was a very tense moment. Somewhere down in that great blue disc below a Mapping Command ship sat in an open field, sending up the beam which was guiding them down. But it was not the Mapping Command that was important. The Mapping Command was always first. What mattered now was to come in second, any kind of second, close or wide, mile or eyelash, but second come hell or high water.
The clouds peeled away. Travis staring anxiously down could see nothing but mist and heavy cloud. He could not help sniffing the air and groaning inwardly. There is no smell quite as expensive as that of burned generators. He could hear the Old Man repeating over and over again—as if Allspace was not one of the richest companies in existence—"burned generators, boy, is burned money, and don't you forget it!" Fat chance me forgetting it, Travis thought gloomily, twitching his nostrils. But a moment later he did.
For Diomed III was below him.
And Diomed III was an Open Planet.
It happened less often, nowadays, that the Mapping Command ran across intelligent life, and it was even less often that the intelligent life was humanoid. But when it happened it was an event to remember. For space travel had brought with it two great problems. The first was Contact, the second was Trade. For many years Man had prohibited contact with intelligent humanoids who did not yet have space travel, on the grounds of the much-discussed Maturity Theory. As time went by, however, and humanoid races were discovered which were biologically identical with Man, and as great swarms of completely alien, often hostile races were also discovered, the Maturity Theory went into discard. A human being, ran the new slogan, is a Human Being, and so came the first great Contact Law, which stated that any humanoid race, regardless of its place on the evolutionary scale, was to be contacted. To be accepted, yea, welcomed,
as the phrase went, into the human community. And following this, of course, there came Trade. For it was the businessmen who had started the whole thing in the first place.
Hence the day of the Open Planet. A humanoid race was discovered by the Mapping Command, the M.C. made its investigation, and then sent out the Word. And every company in the Galaxy, be it monstrous huge or piddling small, made a mad rush to be first on the scene. The Government was very strict about the whole business, the idea being that planets should make their contracts with companies rather than the government itself, so that if any shady business arose the company at fault could be kicked out,