AGENT OF
T.E.R.R.A. # 1
THE FLYING
SAUCER GAMBIT
LARRY MADDOCK
(Jack Owen
Jardine)
Webley, Hannibal
Fortune, The Agent of T.E.R.R.A., and the characters featured in the series of
novels so named are the creations of and copyright by Jack Owen Jardine 1966,
1967, 1969, and the sole property of his heir and daughter Sabra Jardine,
OTHER T.E.R.R.A. STORIES BU LARRY MADDOCK
The
Adventures of Webley, Agent of T.E.R.R.A. (prequel)
#0.1
Creatures, Incorporated
#0.2
Alien for Hire
#0.3
When in Doubt
The
Adventures of Hannibal Fortune, Agent of T.E.R.R.A.
#1
The Flyng Saucer Gambit
#2
The Golden Goddess Gambit
#3
The Emerald Elephant Gambit
#4
The Time Trap Gambit
CONTENTS
04:34:30
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
04:34:30
SOROBIN KIMBALL
finished his report and rewound the tape.
"That ought to bring some action," be said to the small monkey
curled up in the armchair across the room.
The monkey nodded agreement, blinking owlishly.
"You're not
very talkative tonight," Kimball observed.
The monkey
shrugged. Kimball cued the tape, set the
playback to ten times record speed and turned the transmitter filaments
on. Transmission would take two minutes
and twenty-three seconds, perilously close to the maximum allowed. But he'd had a lot to report
It was the first
time in twenty years that he'd had to fire up the transmitter for more than a
six or eight second burst. He knew the
dangers. If Empire or, more
specifically, Drofox Johrgol's branch of the ruthless organization was onto
him, one minute would be enough for them to triangulate his position
exactly. It would be far safer to split
the report up into six or seven segments and beam one each night to T.E.R.R.A.
Control. But there wasn't time for that.
He and Glarrk
had talked it over and decided to take their chances. Quite possibly Johrgol's boys would be napping,
wouldn't have anyone near enough to strike.
It was a calculated risk which both of them were willing to take.
Kimball set the
timer. Figuring the rotation of the
earth, the tight beam of his transmission and the distance to its destination,
Control would be able to pick him up from 04:32:20 until 04:34:55 ,
at which time the trailing edge of the beam would sweep across their receptors
and fan out across the Milky Way. He
looked at the clock. 2:17 .
Unhurriedly—for
Sorobin Kimball was not a man easily given to excitement—he went to the pantry
and built a sandwich of peanut butter, bologna, lettuce and catsup. "You might as well eat," he remarked
to his companion. "There's nothing
much else we can do."
The monkey scampered
across the floor and leaped to the edge of the counter, taking a slice of
bologna and rolling it into a tight tube, then wrapping a piece of bread around
it. Quietly, both ate. There was no need for further conversation.
At 04:32:07 they heard the throb of the
huge generator, its deep-pitched hum changing rapidly to a whine that soon
wafted beyond audible range.
At 04:32:20 a solenoid rammed home and
the tape reels began to spin. Kimball turned
off the lights and stepped outside, leaving the door ajar. The automatic sensors which ringed the small
farmhouse would detect Empire activity before he'd be able to see anything, but
he looked anyway.
At 04:33:42 a
fast-moving light appeared in the southern sky, streaking towards him. It took exactly fourteen seconds to reach
him. Although he knew it was futile,
Kimball whipped out his gun and fired at the hovering craft.
Almost
immediately he felt giddy. Staggering
back into the house, he flipped on the lights and aimed at the spinning
tapes. Four shots destroyed the
recorder, sending up a shower of ruined tape.
The monkey leaped at his head and sank sharp teeth into his left
ear. Kimball ripped the beast away and
shot at it as it scampered to safety behind a large couch. Three more shots tore huge holes in the
couch. The generator slowed, whining
down to audibility.
Now the door
burst open and a man in a tight-fitting black suit aimed a silver tube at
Kimball. Snarling, Kimball whirled to
meet this new threat, but he was too slow.
A beam of brilliant orange light bathed his body and etched his shadow
against the smoldering wall behind him in the split second before Sorobin
Kimball turned to vapor.
The black-suited
Empire agent holstered his weapon and walked outside to the skimmer which
hovered twenty feet from the door. A
ramp yawned open and the man walked inside.
At 04:35:14 the skimmer hurtled away
into the Kansas sky.
Inside the
farmhouse, the trembling monkey huddled over a tiny crack in the floor, behind
the ruined couch. Gradually his body
seemed to deflate, as if it were flowing through the crack—which indeed it
was. Within minutes, the only trace left
of the room's former occupants was the silhouette of a man with a gun etched
against one wall.
CHAPTER TWO
FANCY MEETING YOU HERE
EARTH LOOKED little
different to Hannibal Fortune than it had when he had last seen it almost two
hundred years ago. That had been in the
time of Napoleon; Fortune had been half of a Resident Team then, their task to
prod the Corsican corporal into becoming the Emperor of France. Fortune sighed, those had been the days. Champagne, parties, swordplay, wenches of
various talents and temperaments; he wondered if any of their descendants had
turned out as insanely wonderful.
It was not part
of his assignment to speculate upon the romantic proclivities of Earth's female
population, but it would have been entirely out of character for Hannibal
Fortune to have done otherwise, even in the most harrowing circumstances. It was partly because of his customary
attention to such extraneous detail and partly despite it that he was rated
among Temporal Entropy Restructure and Repair Agency's top half-dozen
operatives. Somehow it contributed to
Fortune's fantastic knack for snatching victory out of the ashes of defeat,
which had earned him the coveted License to Tamper—for when one is
restructuring a timeline, a seemingly extraneous event can often turn into a
crucial pivot point.
Never having
been a pawn, the handsome, debonair agent was often referred to by those in the
Agency's upper echelons as a Bishop or Rook in the mind-staggering chess game
between the Federation and Empire. The
mere fact that it was Hannibal Fortune and not some lesser agent who had been
assigned to find out what had happened to Sorobin Kimball guaranteed the gambit
to be of the highest priority, a mission of great urgency. The fact that his tour of the Seven Planets
had been interrupted by the emergency may have had something to do with his
current speculations on the amorous inclinations of Earth's present female
population. Nevertheless, he did not
allow it to intrude upon the immediate task at hand, which was to conceal the
temporal transporter which had brought him and his partner Webley through time
and space to their present location.
The machine was a
streamlined model, equipped with all the gadgetry T.E.R.R.A.'s technicians
could build into it, including a remote phase-out control which looked
remarkably like a mid-20th Century wristwatch.
A time machine no matter how you looked at it, Fortune mused, thumbing
the control stem. The bulky transporter
winked out of sight, temporally phased ninety degrees ahead of itself. That part of it was easy, like pushing a
button; getting it back was the tricky part, Hannibal reminded himself. It was a little like pushing a button that
would kill you if you happened to shift your position to the wrong place once
you'd pushed it. The techs had been very
specific on that point, putting on the airs of superiority that techs often
resort to when in the presence of mere operatives.
"Clever,
huh?" Fortune said aloud.
"Astonishing,"
Webley's bored voice hissed three inches from his left ear. "Someday they'll teach 'em to think; and
the machines will take over completely."
"Ready to
start hunting?"
In answer,
Webley flowed into a compact ball, dragging his semi-solid other half
delicately across the back of Fortune's neck.
Hannibal shifted his stance accordingly, for his partner, although light
on his pseudopods, weighed almost fifteen pounds. It took but a few seconds for the symbiote to
reassemble himself, warping his pliant protoplasm into a working semblance of a
large bird. A moment later, without a
word of farewell, Webley flapped off into the night. It was one of his favorite forms, and a good
one for reconnaissance.
Fortune, more
conventionally constructed, was stuck with the limitations of his
man-shape. He could neither flow, fly
nor flit, nor was he telepathic like his partner. But his dossier at T.E.R.R.A. Control left no
doubt that if anyone could find out what had happened to Sorobin Kimball,
Hannibal Fortune was the man to do it.
Resourcefully, he found a stump and sat down to wait.
The struggle
between Empire and T.E.R.R.A. was an odd chess game, be reflected, with
billions of pawns who neither knew nor cared, pawn-fashion, who the real
opponents were, and who would have been unable at any rate to comprehend the
prize which awaited the winner—a prize more than six hundred years in the
future, involving the forty-seven inhabited solar systems in one galaxy. What man on Earth could conceive of a
struggle which involved forty-seven solar systems? What mere global strategist could imagine
that the subjugation of scores of thickly populated planets would depend upon
the outcome of his own puny single-planet battles? What Earthman could seriously contemplate
such a holocaust when the potential vaporization of his own insignificant ball
of mud was too mind-staggering for him to really take seriously? It was a concept which often eluded Fortune
himself, who had grown to manhood on just such a world. It was a concept so elusive that most of
T.E.R.R.A.'s agents had to content themselves with arbitrary statements of
policy and unquestioning obedience to the tactical decisions plotted by the
Galactic Federation's master computer.
Only a handful, such as Hannibal Fortune, were Licensed to Tamper.
Sorobin Kimball
had not been a member of that select group.
His last message to T.E.R.R.A. Control had concerned Empire intervention
in Earth's current war and his discovery of a suspected Empire agent in the
U.S. Air Force. That, combined with his
earlier report of a concentration of Empire skimmers—which the natives quaintly
dubbed "Flying Saucers"—had prompted Control to cut short Fortune's
vacation. Skimmers, in an observation
capacity, had been flitting about Earth's atmosphere for several decades, but
never before had there been quite so many of them. Kimball's assignment had included keeping
track of them and staying out of sight.
Now both he and his symbiote, Glarrk, a counterpart of Fortune's Webley,
seemed to have disappeared. As far as
Earth-time was concerned, Kimball's last message had been broadcast half an
hour ago, although Control had taken two weeks to complete their preparations for
Fortune's arrival. The temporal
transporter had taken up the time-slack, so that Hannibal and Co. would have
fresh tracks to follow—which was what Webley was doing now.
Within ten
minutes Webley was back, a flurry of feathers braking near Fortune's head and
settling gently on his shoulder, where he immediately flowed back into his
customary yoke-like position.
"Half a
mile to the east," the symbiote reported. "I felt a presence. I think it's Glarrk, but I'm not sure. There are no traces of Empire in the area,
though." Fortune was already on his
feet, walking toward the faint glow of false dawn. "What do you mean, you're not sure it's
Glarrk? Didn't you make esper contact?"
"He
wouldn't mesh. Or couldn't. The presence was very faint."
Hannibal patted
his pockets as he walked, checking once more his equipment. The suit was in the style of 1966, two
button, medium lapel, which fit his six-foot frame as if tailored by one of Earth's
top clothiers. Its one significant
difference was that it was indestructible, its component pieces having been
individually woven to exact size in order, to get around the impossibility of
cutting the finished fabric. Holstered
neatly inside the jacket was a small, flat handgun with a charge sufficient for
three hundred shots. Its mechanics were
a diabolical refinement of the laser principle.
With their customary thoroughness, the techs: had taught Fortune to take
it apart and put it back together again.
In another
pocket, nestled a flat, dull-finished case which contained, among other things,
three highly specialized cigarettes. One
was merely explosive, the second produced a gas which was guaranteed to provide
several minutes of acute discomfort for a roomful of people, and the third
contained a tiny transmitting device which would pick up and broadcast anything
within an effective thirty-foot radius.
In addition, the case contained a device which would shoot paralyzing
narco-pellets with reasonable accuracy and with sufficient force to penetrate
normal epidermis up to sixty feet away.
The tech who had engineered this devious toy had been awarded a special
T.E.R.R.A. citation for thinking mean.
Built into
Fortune's belt was a flexible steel dagger which could be used, when needed, as
a burglary tool. Completing the
itinerant arsenal was an expensive looking Florentine gold cigarette lighter
with a flame which could kindle cigarettes or, with a minor adjustment, cut
through one half inch of tempered steel.
Not knowing precisely what sort of troubles he might encounter,
T.E.R.R.A. had equipped him to deal with a variety of possible situations. In the past, Fortune had found such gimmickry
totally superfluous and agreed to carry only those items whose potential
usefulness clearly outweighed the trouble of packing them around.
Hannibal Fortune
had been one of the first wave of T.E.R.R.A. recruits. In a sense, Temporal Entropy Restructure and
Repair Agency was still a young organization, having been created by secret
vote of the Galactic Federation Security Council in 2558. Its base-time now was the year 2572, which
made T.E.R.R.A. only fourteen years old.
Fortune had been with it for twelve of those fourteen years.
The first wave
of cadets, including Fortune, had been skimmed from among the top history
students of the forty-seven member planets of the Galactic Federation. T.E.R.R.A. had used the most enticing bait
possible to recruit avid history nuts: the opportunity for a man to actually
live in his favorite period of history, to see it firsthand. Fortune had known that a time machine had
been invented in 2548, and that by '54 the G.F. had declared it illegal. He'd never heard of Gregor Malik and the
sinister organization called Empire until after T.E.R.R.A. had recruited
him. But now, thanks to the illegal
temporal transporter which T.E.R.R.A.'s scientists were continually perfecting,
he'd logged some sixty years' experience fighting Empire. The agent grinned. Quite an accomplishment in twelve years of
service.
But T.E.R.R.A.
had accomplished much in its fourteen years, scattering some ten thousand
highly skilled Resident Agents among forty-seven planets and along timelines
reaching back as far as forty-two centuries, with another ten thousand
administrative, technical and clerical workers within the huge artificial
planet in the exact center of the galaxy which housed T.E.R.R.A. Control. It seemed ironic that this sprawling
organization had to be formed to protect the universe against the evil
ambitions of one man, Gregor Malik, Tyrant of the planet Borius, and his
fourteen unscrupulous henchmen.
Continue reading and buy this book now. CLICK HERE.
Continue reading and buy this book now. CLICK HERE.
