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    Watch the Sky
    Watch the Sky
    Watch the Sky
    Ebook36 pages29 minutes

    Watch the Sky

    By James H. Schmitz

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The Geest gun — the Gunderland Battle trophy on the wall — attracts plotters and generates a plot. Like Rudyard Kipling's bejeweled elephant-goad in "The King's Ankus", the Geest gun stirs ambition in people. More than in the Kipling though, these seem competent, thoughtfully dangerous men.(Goodreads)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOtbebookpublishing
    Release dateMar 4, 2019
    ISBN9783965370272
    Watch the Sky

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      Book preview

      Watch the Sky - James H. Schmitz

      Watch The Sky

      It's one thing to try to get away with what you

      believe to be a lie and be caught at it—

      and something different, and far worse

      sometimes, to find it isn't a lie ...

      by James H. Schmitz

      Illustrated by Hortens

      Uncle William Boles' war-battered old Geest gun gave the impression that at some stage of its construction it had been pulled out of shape and then hardened in that form. What remained of it was all of one piece. The scarred and pitted twin barrels were stubby and thick, and the vacant oblong in the frame behind them might have contained standard energy magazines. It was the stock which gave the alien weapon its curious appearance. Almost eighteen inches long, it curved abruptly to the right and was too thin, knobbed and indented to fit comfortably at any point in a human hand. Over half a century had passed since, with the webbed, boneless fingers of its original owner closed about it, it last spat deadly radiation at human foemen. Now it hung among Uncle William's other collected oddities on the wall above the living room fireplace.

      And today, Phil Boles thought, squinting at the gun with reflectively narrowed eyes, some eight years after Uncle William's death, the old war souvenir would quietly become a key factor in the solution of a colonial planet's problems. He ran a finger over the dull, roughened frame, bent closer to study the neatly lettered inscription: GUNDERLAND BATTLE TROPHY, ANNO 2172, SGT. WILLIAM G. BOLES. Then, catching a familiar series of clicking noises from the hall, he straightened quickly and turned away. When Aunt Beulah's go-chair came rolling back into the room, Phil was sitting at the low tea table, his back to the fireplace.

      The go-chair's wide flexible treads carried it smoothly down the three steps to the sunken section of the living room, Beulah sitting jauntily erect in it, for all the ninety-six years which had left her the last survivor of the original group of Earth settlers on the world of Roye. She tapped her fingers here and there on the chair's armrests, swinging it deftly about, and brought it to a stop beside the tea table.

      That was Susan Feeney calling, she

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