Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians)
Don Pendleton’s
Science Fiction Collection
3 Books
Box Set
The Guns of Terra 10
The Godmakers
The Olympians
Pendleton Artists
California
Books by Don Pendleton
The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series
The Joe Copp Private Eye Series
The Ashton Ford Psychic Detective Series
The Guns of Terra 10
The Godmakers
The Olympians
Roulette: The Search for the Sunrise Killer
by Don and Linda Pendleton
To Dance With Angels
by Don and Linda Pendleton
Whispers From the Soul
by Don and Linda Pendleton
A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet
The Metaphysics of the Novel: The Inner Workings of a Novel and a Novelist by Don Pendleton, with Linda Pendleton
The Cosmic Breath: Metaphysical Essays of Don Pendleton by Linda Pendleton
The Executioner: War Against the Mafia, Comic Adaptation by Don and Linda Pendleton
Don Pendleton’s Science Fiction Collection Box Set.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 2012 by Linda Pendleton. All Rights Reserved.
First Kindle Box Set Edition by Pendleton Artists, December 2012.
The Guns of Terra 10, Copyright © 1970 by Don Pendleton; Renewal Copyright © 1998 by Linda Pendleton, Stephen Pendleton, Gregory Pendleton, Melinda Margulies, Jennifer Dalto, Derek Pendleton, Marjorie Pendleton, All Rights Reserved.
The Godmakers, Copyright © 1970 by Don Pendleton; Renewal Copyright © 1998 by Linda Pendleton, Stephen Pendleton, Gregory Pendleton, Melinda Margulies, Jennifer Dalto, Derek Pendleton, Marjorie Pendleton, All Rights Reserved.
The Olympians, Copyright © 1969 by Don Pendleton;
Renewal Copyright © 1997 by Linda Pendleton, Stephen Pendleton, Gregory Pendleton, Melinda Margulies, Jennifer Dalto, Derek Pendleton, Marjorie Pendleton, All Rights Reserved.
Cover Design by Judy Bullard.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of Linda Pendleton.
These books are a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Pendleton Artists
California
The Guns of Terra 10
Don Pendleton
For Rod, and for all the conscious men.
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will... is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men.
—Sir Isaiah Berlin
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
—Erich Fromm
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities . . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
—Charles Darwin
CHAPTER ONE
The Big Gamble
A trickling chill shivered through his six-and-a-half foot frame, causing Gunner Zach Whaleman to pause momentarily on the porch outside Board Central. He shook off the weird sense of alarm and gazed down on the brilliantly lighted grounds and the artificial grass and flowers which concealed the ugly black sands of Board Island. The volcanic island in the Central Atlantic could have been on any of the dead planets, he was thinking, except for the dense atmosphere and the pleasant environmental conditions. There was little about Board Island to remind a man of his Terran roots. Grim and bleak, just as most other places in the solar system, there was nothing here of sweet scents and exhilarating landscapes which made the earth stand unique in the solar scheme. Whaleman quickly descended the steps and angled across the synthetic turf toward the parking area.
A pretty GovTech stepped out of an intersecting walkway, smiled, hesitantly at the big Gunner, then quickly approached. He recognized her intent and slowed his pace to allow the interception.
The girl was petitely human, fully two feet shorter than Whaleman, but shapely and appealing in the GovTech gray.
“Well done, Gunner,” she greeted him. “I saw your shooting. Do you stay at Board Island tonight?”
Another chill traversed the Gunner’s frame. Again he dismissed it and bent to receive a kiss on the cheek. It was a social gesture, completely lacking in erotic undertones. “I am not yet decided,” he replied coolly.
“My quarters are available for sexual companionship,” she informed him.He touched hands with her and said, “Apology, I am not yet decided.”
The girl smiled, the usual lip-twister of the homans. “Billet 7 Berth 64, if you decide.”
Whaleman jerked his head lightly to the left in a terse salute and went on his way. He realized that the girl was simply being hospitable. Homan females were not generally attracted to Defense Commanders, and vice versa. Whaleman preferred the more bountiful charms of Defense Command females. He supposed it to be a matter of genes, dismissed the girl from his mind, and turned into the parking station.
His gravcar was one of only about a dozen remaining, and he was more than a little surprised to find it surrounded by a party of Defense Commanders. The hatch stood open and a blond giant was seated at the controls. Whaleman hastened his pace, a strange feeling beginning at the pit of his stomach. His first thought was that a crew from one of the cruisers selected to tow Terra 10 was awaiting him, and he could think of no reason why they should do so. Was there a glitch in the schedule?
A huge Commander with space-black hair stepped forward to greet Whaleman. Some indefinable strangeness of the man’s uniform intensified the curling of the Gunner’s stomach.
“Ho, Gunner,” the odd-looking commander greeted him.
Whaleman touched hands with him and immediately knew another strangeness. The man’s hand was steely hard, tight and rough to the touch. The voice also possessed a timbre that was totally alien to Defense Commanders. It was deep, resonant, almost musical. Whaleman stiffened.
“Identity,” he demanded.
The others were forming a loose circle about them. The dark man laughed and said, “I’m Tom Cole, King of the Reevers.”
Whaleman’s first impulse was to smile at an obvious joke, but the smile came as a frozen grimace. The man was not joking. The blond man poked his head through the open hatch of the gravcar and announced, “Hey, Tom, I’ve got the thing figured out. I can fly’er.”
The words came as a musical blur to Zach Whaleman. Even so, his worst fears were realized.
“Reevers!” he spat disgustedly. “Why in uniform of Defense Command? Why on corporate grounds?” He shoved the dark giant aside and strode angrily toward the gravcar.
“Take him!” Tom Cole thundered, and. then the unbelievable occurred. A Gunner of the Defense Command was physically attacked by an idiot band of Reevers.
A hard fist in his belly doubled Whaleman over at the waist and another smashing blow to the head sat him down. He gazed dully around, trying to understand the astounding attack. Then a long-dormant instinct, which not even genetic manipulation could complete
ly destroy, took charge of the Gunner’s body, and he scrambled to his feet with an angry bellow, lashing out at his attackers with murderous sweeps of his big arms. Two of the Reevers were sent rolling across the synturf and another was chopped to the ground before Whaleman was overcome and borne down by the weight of determined numbers. Tom Cole stepped into the pile-up and delivered a stunning blow to the Gunner’s chin. He stopped fighting then, and was hauled to his feet and hustled into the gravcar.
The Reever leader roughly shoved the Gunner into a rear seat, pinning him in between two other men. The others quickly climbed in, and the car rose jerkily into the air.
The big blond chuckled as he bent tensely over the controls.
“Not bad for a stupid-ass mental deficient, eh?” he crowed triumphantly.
The gravcar pitched about and began slipping away toward the west in a sharply crabbing attitude. The driver made a correction, and they levelled into a smooth acceleration.
“Do that again, Hedge, and I’ll throw up,” a man said shakily.
“Leave ’im alone, he’s doing fine,” Tom Cole rumbled from the middle row of seats. He swivelled about to regard his prisoner with a hard stare. “You’re quite a fighter,” he said admiringly.
Whaleman understood none of the rushing gibberish, the words impacting his mind as a meaningless blur. He was dazed and, for the first time in his memory, frightened.
“Request slow speak,” he said thickly.
The big Reever exploded into laughter. “You gotta talk like robots, boys, if you want to get through to this superguy. For Mars’ sake, don’t talk like men!”
His companions joined in with gleeful comments, and the man seated to Whaleman’s right playfully slapped the Gunner’s knee and gave him a reassuring smile. But none of them addressed Whaleman directly throughout the remainder of the trip to North America. They skimmed along barely above the heaving Atlantic, and Whaleman tried to relax as the hurtling gravcar maneuvered wildly around hovering sea-harvesters and automated ocean stations. Occasionally, he would see shimmering blobs beneath the waters, which could only be the mammoth floor-crawlers. Then they were flashing over green fields and majestic orchards, and the untutored pilot was cautiously increasing their altitude.
A strip city appeared momentarily as a horizon-to-horizon unbroken line of brilliant structures, then instantly disappeared from view as they swept past and dropped to a tree-skimming level. Whaleman held his breath and hoped that the driver knew the terrain well as they hurtled on just above the treetops at quadrasonic speed.
A moment later, they were braking into a jarring slowdown and the gravcar was going into a lateral spin. One of the Reevers yelled something unintelligible, and the blond man was jerking at the stabilizer.
Whaleman released his constricted lungs and glanced down toward the ground. They were descending slowly now, in good control, and settling gently into a small clearing in the trees. Plastic huts with domed roofs ringed the clearing, from which near-naked people were erupting and running excitedly about in the open area.
The dark giant with the black hair leaned over his seat and touched Whaleman lightly on the chin.
“We mean you no harm,” he told the Gunner in precise tones. “You are honored guest of the Reevers.”
Whaleman met the fierce gaze and nodded his head in understanding. He had, of course, been thoroughly indoctrinated regarding the pathetic Reevers. They were like children—emotional, undisciplined, unstable. He could humor them for awhile.
“I have three days,” he replied stiffly. “Then I must return to Terra 10. It is vital.”
“You’ll return all right,” Tom Cole assured him, smiling. “Even a Reever understands the importance of Terra 10.” Then he laughed softly and moved toward the hatch as the gravcar touched down.
Whaleman did not feel particularly reassured. He glanced out the viewport and sighed with resignation. The Reevers outside were behaving like lunatics, dancing about, turning cartwheels, slapping hands together and chanting an emotional cry of blurred words. Except for infrequent visits to Board Island, this was the Gunner’s first adult touchdown on the mother planet. He had been down once, as a child of five, just prior to his matriculation at the Defense Academy at Moonport. Even so, he wished he had gone with the Homan GovTech who had offered him her bed and body for the night. Homan sex or not, it would have been preferable to spending his first adult holiday on earth in an insane asylum.
Whaleman steeled himself as he stepped through the hatch and into the tumultuous reception. How tragic, he thought. How terribly, terribly tragic.
It seemed that he was being welcomed as some sort of visiting deity. As a matter of fact, he was. He represented, to the Reevers, the final desperate gamble for man in a world of machines. But none, except perhaps Tom Cole, were even dimly aware of the staggering obstacles that lay asprawl that gamble.
Cole clasped the tall Gunner to him in a rough embrace and rumbled, “Welcome home, Zach Whaleman.”
“Home?” Whaleman echoed weakly, his eyes on a reception line of cavorting Reevers.
The Reever chief nodded solemnly, replying, “Yes, the only home for man in the universe. You are a man, aren’t you, Zach Whaleman?”
Numbly, the Gunner of Terra 10 moved into the dancing throng without replying. Of course, he thought, I am a man. But what are these?
CHAPTER TWO
An Impossible Dream
Several hours prior to his kidnapping by the Tom Cole Raiders, Zach Whaleman had starred in an event which all of Solana uneasily awaited since the first faint evidence of alien life had been detected in the galactic corridor. For a world long free of aggressive violence, the problem of solar system defense was not an easy one to face. The Terra class solar-orbiting gunships had been conceived one hundred years earlier. Nine generations of the deepspace super-dreadnaughts had died in the design-computers. Construction of the tenth generation had actually been underway for two decades. After a seemingly interminable succession of glitches, redesigns, and modifications, Terra 10 had become a reality. A gleaming tifusion sphere, one-half mile in diameter whose primary batteries could annihilate sizeable planets, she was fully automated, practically self-maintaining, and absolutely impervious to any known force of man or nature. But she had been a long time a’coming.
Gunner Zach Whaleman was literally born to the problem, having been genetically programmed at conception for his future role as a Defense Command technologist-tactician. All twenty-five years of his lifetime had been focussed upon the event which was about to take place—"the Demonstration/Readiness Exercises for the most awesome weapons system to emerge from man’s technology. Fittingly, the exercises were being staged from the center of government and being televised throughout Solana.
The young Gunner, clad immaculately in the sky-blue tunic and space-black tights of the Defense Command, showed no hint of nervousness or discomfort as he faced the assembled corporate heads of Solana. Zach Whaleman’s genes had not been engineered for nervousness. Also, no living being knew Terra 10 as Zach knew her. They had grown up together.
The twelve Directors of the Solan Corporation, the President, and the sixteen Vice-Presidents occupied positions on a crescent-shaped dais behind the Gunnery Console. The seat provided for the Chairman of the Board was vacant. A tradition, older than living memory, precluded public appearances by the corporation’s highest officer. Above and behind the dais, the chamber was filled with lesser administrative officers from the satellite communities.
Automated televisors hovered inconspicuously overhead to relay the scene to viewers around the solar system.
Whaleman was very much aware that at the moment he was being watched by perhaps ninety-nine per cent of the human race. He bowed in an almost imperceptible movement of the waist and introduced himself in the precise monotones which were characteristic of Defense Commanders.
“Gunner Zachary Whaleman, Technical Commander, Solana’s Gunship Terra 10,” he announced. He paused brie
fly and then continued in the same clipped delivery. “First firing exercise is Secondary Battery of Anti-Gravity Diffusioneers. Short term, AGRAD. Range is zero to 3,000 nautmiles. Target will traverse gunnery envelope at 2.87 thousand nautmiles. Second firing is Primary Battery of Matter/Anti-Matter Emitters. Short term, MAME. Range is 2,000 to .9 million nautmiles. Target will enter gunnery envelope at .85 million.”
The tall Gunner, a splendid specimen of disciplined masculinity six and a half feet high, moved smoothly to the console and eased into the command chair.
The Gunnery Console, specially installed for the exercises, was a duplicate of the regular controller at Moonbase. A large viewscreen at the upper left showed various exterior views of the gunship as she idled in a thousand-mile parking orbit of the earth. An adjacent screen provided the target display, and could accommodate simultaneously a target for each of Terra 10’s forty guns.
Whaleman activated a control circuit and immediately a target drone appeared in the right-hand display. So perfect was the picture that even the markings on the 40-foot cylinder could be read. The other screen showed Terra 10 from eight views as she performed an automatic four-degree axis roll •and slipped about to an eight-degree polar declination. A twelve-foot diameter gunport slid open, and the focal grid of an AGRAD battery began its pulsing dance.
For the benefit of the viewers, Whaleman explained: “AGRAD target acquisition is automatic. Gross adjustment is to nearest appropriate gun.” He pointed out an indicator on the console. “Target Scan now makes fine adjustment.”