The Beast-Jewel of Mars - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Beast-Jewel of Mars write by Leigh Brackett. This book was released on 2011-06-10. The Beast-Jewel of Mars available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The wise men of Caer Dhu were not so wise. They found the secret of Shanga, and they escaped their wars and their troubles by fleeing backward along the path of evolution.Excerpt Burk Winters remained in the passenger section while the Starflight made her landing at Kahora Port. He did not think that he could bear to see another man, not even one he liked as much as he did Johnny Niles, handle the controls of the ship that had been his for so long.He did not wish even to say goodbye to Johnny, but there was no avoiding it. The young officer was waiting for him as he came down the ramp, and the deep concern he felt was not hidden in the least by his casually hearty grin.Johnny held out his hand. "So long, Burk. You've earned this leave. Have fun with it."Burk Winters looked out over the vast tarmac that spread for miles across the ochre desert. An orderly, roaring confusion of trucks and flatcars and men and ships-ore ships, freighters, tramps, sleek liners like the Starflight, bearing the colors of three planets and a dozen colonies, but still arrogantly and predominantly Terran.Johnny followed his gaze and said softly, "It always gives you a thrill, doesn't it?"Winters did not answer. Miles away, safe from the thundering rocket blasts, the glassite dome of Kahora, Trade City for Mars, rose jewel-like out of the red sand. The little sun stared wearily down and the ancient hills considered it, and the old, old wandering wind passed over it, and it seemed as though the planet bore Kahora and its spaceport with patience, as though it were a small local infection that would soon be gone.He had forgotten Johnny Niles. He had forgotten everything but his own dark thoughts. The young officer studied him with covert pity, and he did not know it.Burk Winters was a big man, and a tough man, tempered by years of deep-space flying. The same glare of naked light that had burned his skin so dark had bleached his hair until it was almost white, and just in the last few months his gray eyes seemed to have caught and held a spark of that pitiless radiance. The easy good nature was gone out of them, and the lines that laughter had shaped around his mouth had deepened now into bitter scars.
The Beast-Jewel of Mars
The Beast-Jewel of Mars - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Beast-Jewel of Mars write by V. E. Thiessen. This book was released on 2020. The Beast-Jewel of Mars available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Visions of Mars
Visions of Mars - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Visions of Mars write by Howard V. Hendrix,. This book was released on 2011-02-21. Visions of Mars available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Seventeen wide-ranging essays explore the evolving scientific understanding of Mars, and the relationship between that understanding and the role of Mars in literature, the arts and popular culture. Essays in the first section examine different approaches to Mars by scientists and writers Jules Verne and J.H. Rosny. Section Two covers the uses of Mars in early Bolshevik literature, Wells, Brackett, Burroughs, Bradbury, Heinlein, Dick and Robinson, among others. The third section looks at Mars as a cultural mirror in science fiction. Essayists include prominent writers (e.g., Kim Stanley Robinson), scientists and literary critics from many nations.
Thralls of the Endless Night
Thralls of the Endless Night - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Thralls of the Endless Night write by Leigh Brackett. This book was released on 2011-06-10. Thralls of the Endless Night available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In the freezing night the great ship held mysterious secrets, secrets that the Piruts and the Hans wanted.Excerpt Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him.He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully."I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families."His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled, "Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the socking child. She added sharply, "Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.""Who's to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy over-lids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, slicking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.The same sandscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks in it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched.Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.Beyond the Hans quarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were the Engineers. Not many of them anymore. You could see the rusty lumps where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.And beyond the Engineers - the Officers.The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.
The Stellar Legion
The Stellar Legion - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Stellar Legion write by Leigh Brackett. This book was released on 2011-11-05. The Stellar Legion available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. MacIan was a man with a secret, and it had followed him to Venus and the Legion, escape was impossible...ExcerptSilence was on the barracks like a lid clamped over tight-coiled springs. Men in rumpled uniforms-outlanders of the Stellar Legion, space-rats, the scrapings of the Solar System-sweated in the sullen heat of the Venusian swamplands before the rains. Sweated and listened.The metal door clanged open to admit Lehn, the young Venusian Commandant, and every man jerked tautly to his feet. Ian MacIan, the white-haired, space-burned Earthman, alone and hungrily poised for action; Thekla, the swart Martian low-canaler, grinning like a weasel beside Bhak, the hulking strangler from Titan. Every quick nervous glance was riveted on Lehn.The young officer stood silent in the open door, tugging at his fair mustache; to MacIan, watching, he was a trim, clean incongruity in this brutal wilderness of savagery and iron men. Behind him, the eternal mists writhed in a thin curtain over the swamp, stretching for miles beyond the soggy earthworks; through it came the sound every ear had listened to for days, a low, monotonous piping that seemed to ring from the ends of the earth. The Nahali, the six-foot, scarlet-eyed swamp-dwellers, whose touch was weapon enough, praying to their gods for rain. When it came, the hot, torrential downpour of southern Venus, the Nahali would burst in a scaly tide over the fort.Only a moat of charged water and four electro-cannons stood between the Legion and the horde. If those things failed, it meant two hundred lives burned out, the circle of protective forts broken, the fertile uplands plundered and laid waste. MacIan looked at Lehn's clean, university-bred young face, and wondered cynically if he was strong enough to do his job.Lehn spoke, so abruptly that the men started. "I'm calling for volunteers. A reconnaissance in Nahali territory; you know well enough what that means. Three men. Well?"Ian MacIan stepped forward, followed instantly by the Martian Thekla. Bhak the Titan hesitated, his queerly bright, blank eyes darting from Thekla to Lehn, and back to MacIan. Then he stepped up, his hairy face twisted in a sly grin.Lehn eyed them, his mouth hard with distaste under his fair mustache. Then he nodded, and said; "Report in an hour, light equipment." Turning to go, he added almost as an afterthought, "Report to my quarters, MacIan. Immediately."MacIan's bony Celtic face tightened and his blue eyes narrowed with wary distrust. But he followed Lehn, his gaunt, powerful body as ramrod-straight as the Venusian's own, and no eye that watched him go held any friendship.
