Criminal In Chief: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

By R. L. Saunders

If you haven't noticed, criminals like to run things their way. Mostly into the ground.
Some even become politicians (even though we all know that government only does one thing well - screw up everything they touch.)
So having a criminal running a government, at any level is a basic disaster in the making. Only their own conscience (and God) can tell you how they got that way.
For the rest of us, we just have to pray they come to their senses (or get locked away where they can't hurt anyone else.)
These satires are a great way to catch up on how criminals work and what they are going to do in the future.
Otherwise, have fun reading and get entertained.

Space Opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it usually involves conflict between opponents possessing advanced abilities, futuristic weapons, and other sophisticated technology.
The term has no relation to music, as in a traditional opera, but is instead a play on the terms "soap opera", a melodramatic television series, and "horse opera", which was coined during the 1930s to indicate a formulaic Western movie. Space operas emerged in the 1930s and continue to be produced in literature, film, comics, television, and video games.

The Golden Age of Pulp Magazine Fiction derives from pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps") as they were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". (Wikipedia)
The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were proving grounds for those authors like Robert Heinlein, Louis LaMour, "Max Brand", Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and many others. The best writers moved onto longer fiction required by paperback publishers. Many of these authors have never been out of print, even long after their passing.
 
Anthology containing:

• An Incident on Route 12 by James H. Schmitz
• Vengeance on Mars! by Jerome Bixby
• The Eel by Miriam Allen De Ford
• Alien Equivalent by Richard Rein Smith
• Wreck Off Triton by Alfred Coppel
• Heist Job on Thizar by Randall Garrett
• The Monster That Threatened the Universe by R. R. Winterbotham
• Blind Play by Chandler Davis
• Baker's Dozens by Jim Harmon
• The Star of Satan by Henry Hasse
• Enter the Nebula by Carl Jacobi
• Mirage for Planet X by Stanley Mullen

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Midwest Journal Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220249966

Book preview

book...)

AN INCIDENT ON ROUTE 12

BY JAMES H. SCHMITZ

He was already a thief, prepared to steal again. He didn’t know that he himself was only booty!

PHIL GARFIELD WAS THIRTY miles south of the little town of Redmon on Route Twelve when he was startled by a series of sharp, clanking noises. They came from under the Packard’s hood.

The car immediately began to lose speed. Garfield jammed down the accelerator, had a sense of sick helplessness at the complete lack of response from the motor. The Packard rolled on, getting rid of its momentum, and came to a stop.

Phil Garfield swore shakily. He checked his watch, switched off the headlights and climbed out into the dark road. A delay of even half an hour here might be disastrous. It was past midnight, and he had another hundred and ten miles to cover to reach the small private airfield where Madge waited for him and the thirty thousand dollars in the suitcase on the Packard’s front seat.

If he didn’t make it before daylight....

He thought of the bank guard. The man had made a clumsy play at being a hero, and that had set off the fool woman who’d run screaming into their line of fire. One dead. Perhaps two. Garfield hadn’t stopped to look at an evening paper.

But he knew they were hunting for him.

He glanced up and down the road. No other headlights in sight at the moment, no light from a building showing on the forested hills. He reached back into the car and brought out the suitcase, his gun, a big flashlight and the box of shells which had been standing beside the suitcase. He broke the box open, shoved a handful of shells and the .38 into his coat pocket, then took suitcase and flashlight over to the shoulder of the road and set them down.

There was no point in groping about under the Packard’s hood. When it came to mechanics, Phil Garfield was a moron and well aware of it. The car was useless to him now ... except as bait.

But as bait it might be very useful.

Should he leave it standing where it was? No, Garfield decided. To anybody driving past it would merely suggest a necking party, or a drunk sleeping off his load before continuing home. He might have to wait an hour or more before someone decided to stop. He didn’t have the time. He reached in through the window, hauled the top of the steering wheel towards him and put his weight against the rear window frame.

The Packard began to move slowly backwards at a slant across the road. In a minute or two he had it in position. Not blocking the road entirely, which would arouse immediate suspicion, but angled across it, lights out, empty, both front doors open and inviting a passerby’s investigation.

Garfield carried the suitcase and flashlight across the right-hand shoulder of the road and moved up among the trees and undergrowth of the slope above the shoulder. Placing the suitcase between the bushes, he brought out the .38, clicked the safety off and stood waiting.

Some ten minutes later, a set of headlights appeared speeding up Route Twelve from the direction of Redmon. Phil Garfield went down on one knee before he came within range of the lights. Now he was completely concealed by the vegetation.

The car slowed as it approached, braking nearly to a stop sixty feet from the stalled Packard. There were several people inside it; Garfield heard voices, then a woman’s loud laugh. The driver tapped his horn inquiringly twice, moved the car slowly forward. As the headlights went past him, Garfield got to his feet among the bushes, took a step down towards the road, raising the gun.

Then he caught the distant gleam of a second set of headlights approaching from Redmon. He swore under his breath and dropped back out of sight. The car below him reached the Packard, edged cautiously around it, rolled on with a sudden roar of acceleration.

THE SECOND CAR STOPPED when still a hundred yards away, the Packard caught in the motionless glare of its lights. Garfield heard the steady purring of a powerful motor.

For almost a minute, nothing else happened. Then the car came gliding smoothly on, stopped again no more than thirty feet to Garfield’s left. He could see it now through the screening bushes—a big job, a long, low four-door sedan. The motor continued to purr. After a moment, a door on the far side of the car opened and slammed shut.

A man walked quickly out into the beam of the headlights and started towards the Packard.

Phil Garfield rose from his crouching position, the .38 in his right hand, flashlight in his left. If the driver was alone, the thing was now cinched! But if there was somebody else in the car, somebody capable of fast, decisive action, a slip in the next ten seconds might cost him the sedan, and quite probably his freedom and life. Garfield lined up the .38’s sights steadily on the center of the approaching man’s head. He let his breath out slowly as the fellow came level with him in the road and squeezed off one shot.

Instantly he went bounding down the slope to the road. The bullet had flung the man sideways to the pavement. Garfield darted past him to the left, crossed the beam of the headlights, and was in darkness again on the far side of the road, snapping on his flashlight as he sprinted up to the car.

The motor hummed quietly on. The flashlight showed the seats empty. Garfield dropped the light, jerked both doors open in turn, gun pointing into the car’s interior. Then he stood still for a moment, weak and almost dizzy with relief.

There was no one inside. The sedan was his.

The man he had shot through the head lay face down on the road, his hat flung a dozen feet away from him. Route Twelve still stretched out in dark silence to east and west. There should be time enough to clean up the job before anyone else came along. Garfield brought the suitcase down and put it on the front seat of the sedan, then started back to get his victim off the road and out of sight. He scaled the man’s hat into the bushes, bent down, grasped the ankles and started to haul him towards the left side of the road where the ground dropped off sharply beyond the shoulder.

The body made a high, squealing sound and began to writhe violently.

SHOCKED, GARFIELD DROPPED the legs and hurriedly took the gun from his pocket, moving back a step. The squealing noise rose in intensity as the wounded man quickly flopped over twice like a struggling fish, arms and legs sawing about with startling energy. Garfield clicked off the safety, pumped three shots into his victim’s back.

The grisly squeals ended abruptly. The body continued to jerk for another second or two, then lay still.

Garfield shoved the gun back into his pocket. The unexpected interruption had unnerved him; his hands shook as he reached down again for the stranger’s ankles. Then he jerked his hands back, and straightened up, staring.

From the side of the man’s chest, a few inches below the right arm, something like a thick black stick, three feet long, protruded now through the material of the coat.

It shone, gleaming wetly, in the light from the car. Even in that first uncomprehending instant, something in its appearance brought a surge of sick disgust to Garfield’s throat. Then the stick bent slowly halfway down its length, forming a sharp angle, and its tip opened into what could have been three blunt, black claws which scrabbled clumsily against the pavement. Very faintly, the squealing began again, and the body’s back arched up as if another sticklike arm were pushing desperately against the ground beneath it.

Garfield acted in a blur of horror. He emptied the .38 into the thing at his feet almost without realizing he was doing it. Then, dropping the gun, he seized one of the ankles, ran backwards to the shoulder of the road, dragging the body behind him.

In the darkness at the edge of the shoulder, he let go of it, stepped around to the other side and with two frantically savage kicks sent the body plunging over the shoulder and down the steep slope beyond. He heard it crash through the bushes for some seconds, then stop. He turned, and ran back to the sedan, scooping up his gun as he went past. He scrambled into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind him.

His hands shook violently on the steering wheel as he pressed down the accelerator. The motor roared into life and the big car surged forward. He edged it past the Packard, cursing aloud in horrified shock, jammed down the accelerator and went flashing up Route Twelve, darkness racing beside and behind him.

WHAT HAD IT BEEN? SOMETHING that wore what seemed to be a man’s body like a suit of clothes, moving the body as a man moves, driving a man’s car ... roach-armed, roach-legged itself!

Garfield drew a long, shuddering breath. Then, as he slowed for a curve, there was a spark of reddish light in the rear-view mirror.

He stared at the spark for an instant, braked the car to a stop, rolled down the window and looked back.

Far behind him along Route Twelve, a fire burned. Approximately at the point where the Packard had stalled out, where something had gone rolling off the road into the bushes....

Something, Garfield added mentally, that found fiery automatic destruction when death came to it, so that its secrets would remain unrevealed.

But for him the fire meant the end of a nightmare. He rolled the window up, took out a cigarette, lit it, and pressed the accelerator....

In incredulous fright, he felt the nose of the car tilt upwards, headlights sweeping up from the road into the trees.

Then the headlights winked out. Beyond the windshield, dark tree branches floated down towards him, the night sky beyond. He reached frantically for the door handle.

A steel wrench clamped silently about each of his arms, drawing them in against his sides, immobilizing them there. Garfield gasped, looked up at the mirror and saw a pair of faintly gleaming red eyes watching him from the rear of the car. Two of the things ... the second one stood behind him out of sight, holding him. They’d been in what had seemed to be the trunk compartment. And they had come out.

The eyes in the mirror vanished. A moist, black roach-arm reached over the back of the seat beside Garfield, picked up the cigarette he had dropped, extinguished it with rather horribly human motions, then took up Garfield’s gun and drew back out of sight.

He expected a shot, but none came.

One doesn’t fire a bullet through the suit one intends to wear....

It wasn’t until that thought occurred to him that tough Phil Garfield began to scream. He was still screaming minutes later when, beyond the windshield, the spaceship floated into view among the stars.

VENGEANCE ON MARS!

BY D. B. LEWIS

In the dim Water Temple, where the dead grinned down on the dead, Hale met his D-day. Should he give an ex-comrade to the torturing Lhrai or chance the massacre of Terrestrial thousands?

HALE CUT THE MOTOR as he swerved off the ancient plastic roadway. His one-man beetle thumped over the shoulder and, wheels whispering, coasted down the sandy, moonlit slope. It threaded between mighty linla cacti that had the size and shape of spaceships towering grey in the night. He braked it to a slanting stop and got out, a big, long-legged man who carefully kept the little car between himself and the Martian water temple that sat a short distance away where the dunes of the desert began. He thought, Strange to be afraid of getting shot by Randy.

Weiss said, from the shadows, Better get out of the moonlight, Hale. That beetle won’t stop a blaster bolt.

Hale crossed to the clot of men that made dark blurs under the linla. Weiss said, What took you so long?

Hale said, I had to get my gun recharged. Sturm was working on it when Sam came busting in the shop and told me you’d cornered Randy. He touched the blaster at his belt, then brought up the hand to get out a cigarette from his jacket pocket. He struck a match on the blaster butt. Why call me? Why not call the Patrol?

Someone stirred in the darkness, clearing a throat. Patrol never hung a looter yet and as long as Boss Ricco kicks back to Patrol brass, they never will. This one, we’ll take care of personally. The redboys want him.

OVER THE CUPPED MATCH flame, Hale sent a hard glance in the direction of the voice. Eight, ten men aren’t enough.

Weiss said placatingly, We were tipped that he’d try this temple. We were waiting for him, but he got past us. First thing we knew, he killed the guardian inside. We heard the shot. We called on him to surrender, but hell, he knows what the redboys will do to him if we get him alive.

Hale said again, Why call me?

You know these old water temples. One narrow entrance, no windows. He can’t get out, that’s for sure, but we can’t get at him without losing a lot of men. Weiss put a hand on Hale’s arm, and Hale moved impatiently and Weiss took it away, saying, You know Randy better’n any of us.

We came to Mars together, said Hale. We worked our way out on the same crate. We started our farm, but Randy didn’t stick. He said there was always easy money on a frontier, and Mars shouldn’t be any different. Said he preferred four ladies to a hoe.

He should’ve stuck to cards, said the man who had cleared his throat.

George Weiss said, firmly, We want you to go in and talk to him. You were his best friend. He’ll listen to you. Tell him it’s no use.

Hale said, That’s what I figured. He turned to look at the temple, squat and white in the gloom. The doorway was tall and thin and dead black, and behind it, part of the blackness, was Randy and his gun. And he’d be desperate. As Hale turned back he caught a faint, acrid odor, and he knew that a Martian was nearby, crouching, waiting to see that this was done right.

There’ve been a hundred temples stripped of their twin-stones in the past year, Weiss said. Our redboys are getting fed up with it. The C. A.‘s too busy whipping the climate to tend to looters, and the Patrol buys its liquor and mammas with loot money. Half the law is too damned busy, and the other half’s crooked—and we’re in the middle. The redboys have run out of patience.

Hale nodded. My own redboys are ready to go on the warpath. Okay. So Randy’s the goat elect. So relax and starve him out.

They want him tonight. We promised—

All right, go keep it. Hell, I didn’t promise anything. Damned if I’ll risk my neck to—

—promised to deliver, Weiss went on flatly, because we had to. We’re in a nut-cracker, Hale. The Lhrai priests are set to trigger another Green Spot unless they get Randy to play with. Deadline’s dawn.

Hale remembered Green Spot. It was a bloody, terrible memory. Green Spot had been one of the earliest and largest farm-settlements on Mars. One night, for some other-worldly reason that the Colonial Authority was still puzzling about, the Martian workers had slit two hundred Terrestrial throats and vanished into the red desert. The Lhrai priests had conveyed regrets, assuring the Authority at the same time that there had been adequate provocation for the act. And the Authority, horrified for its sixty thousand colonists, had admitted that there must have been.

Hale thought back, in conflicting terms of personal friendship and unit survival. These men in the shadows; most of them were his friends. He had worked with them, leaning on hoes in the fields or sitting in the enclosed warmth of a back porch discussing the perversities of Martian geochemistry. He had helled around Firstport with them, had often led them in the helling. His wife was the friend of their wives. While Randy—

Randy was five years ago. Randy was thirty acres of crops dumped in Hale’s lap when they’d needed working. Randy was a bitter girl named Susan who waited on tables in New Chicago halfway across Mars, and the son he never cared that he’d given her before he went away.

Wait here, said Hale in a sour voice, and tossed away his cigarette. I’ll see what I can do.

THE TEMPLE WAS HEXAGONAL, featureless save for the black slit of the doorway, smooth native marble gleaming under Phobos’ dim silver.

He stopped a few feet away and called, Randy, it’s me. Hale. Don’t shoot. I’m coming in to talk to you.

Randy’s voice, soft and oddly echoed by the temple walls, floated from the black slit. Come on in, Hale. I won a bet with myself, that they’d holler for you.

Hale walked on, slowly, one hand brushing his blaster butt at each step. Again the sensation of strangeness, of wrongness, that he should be afraid of being shot by Randy. Five years ago Randy had been a lean, fox-eyed kid, inclined to be touchy, but no hard-case. But after five years in the excrescent canal-towns, the smoke-filled dives where a coin on the bar bought a drink or a drug and, more covertly tendered, a life—five years in a sour pool, floating with the scums that even fresh water collects when it settles—and now, a looting and a killing—

Hale felt cold, and he was perspiring. The blaster was a solid weight on his thigh.

He reached the doorway and stood uncertainly, knowing the men behind him were watching him. Wondering if he’ll kill me, he thought. Maybe he’s turned into a ring-tailed killer. Kid, kid, why did you have to do it? Why didn’t you get off Mars, like I told you to?

The hollow, echoed voice said, Come on in. I wouldn’t shoot you, Hale. But the voice had a thin sound to it, and Hale thought, He might.

The doorway was about two feet across, in a wall six feet thick. Smooth marble rustled the leather at Hale’s shoulders as he entered the thick blackness. Three paces, echoing, and his fingertips told him he had reached the interior. He felt with his feet, located the top of the shallow steps that every such temple contained—five steps down into a trench which had once held precious water, then three steps up to the temple floor. His bootheels rang sharply—five, two across the trench, three—then he stood in darkness, waiting.

Randy said, You’ve gained some weight, Hale. Or is it the jacket? Sort of amused, but with that same thin sound.

Hale said, Both. He took a forward step, at an angle, and saw the faint flood of moonlight appear on the temple floor and knew that Randy could no longer see him. He said, Weiss said to tell you it’s no use.

George’s out there, eh? Thought I recognized his voice. I wonder who tipped them off. I’ve made some enemies along the canals, I suppose.

Startlingly, a match flamed in the blackness, became an orange glow that rose to the cigarette between Randy’s lips. He was over near a wall, his gun in his other hand. He puffed hard and his face glowed masklike, his eyes seeking Hale.

Hale, blinking, saw that Randy hadn’t changed much. He was still dark and slender, his brown eyes large and bright. But now his hair came down fully to the fur collar of his jacket, in the manner of the canal crowd. The movement that brought him to Hale’s side was graceful.

How many are they, Hale? Think I could break for it?

Hale said, It’d be quicker than the redboys.

Randy pulled in a hard breath. My blaster’s jammed. They could’ve nailed me any time they felt like it. It’s been hell, waiting for that. He looked at the gun. The hand that held it was trembling.

Hale