GENERAL MAX SHORTER
By KRIS NEVILLE
Illustrated by GIUNTA
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy December 1962.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyrighton this publication was renewed.]
To spread Mankind to the stars carries a high cost in lives—andnot all of them are human!
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
I
Miracastle: The initial landing had been made on a flat plateau amongsteep, foreboding mountains which seemed to float through brieflycleared air. In the distance a sharp rock formation stood revealed likean etching: a castle of iron-gray stone whose form had been carved byalien winds and eroded by acid tears from acid clouds.
Far above was a halo where the sun should be. The sun was an orange staronly slightly larger than Sol and as near to Miracastle as Sol to Earth.The orange rays splintered against the fog and gloom was perpetuallyupon the dark face of existence.
This was the first two-stage planet man had ever attempted to colonize.Miracastle was so far from Earth that the long ships were destroyedtwice to reach it.
The technicians came, commanded by General Max Shorter, sixty-threeyears old. Men wearing the circle whose diameter was etched in rubysteel enclosing a background of gleaming ebon—the emblem was a silver Dover a sunburst of hammered gold.
The surface of Miracastle roiled with unfamiliar storms and tornados andhurricanes. Before these, the films of lichen evaporated into dust, andthe sparse and stunted vegetation with ochre foliage turned sear and waspowdered by the fury in the air.
Earth equipment, alien to the orange sun, hammered into the heart ofMiracastle. Night and day it converted the pulverized substance of theplanet in the white-hot core of its atomic furnaces.
Acid rivers snapped at the wind and changed to salt deposits andsuper-heated steam. In the gaseous atmosphere, neutral crystals formedand fell like powdered rain. Miracastle heated and cooled and shiveredwith the virus of man-made chemical reactions, and the storms screamedand tore at the age-old mountains.
Inside the eternal, self-renewing Richardson domes, the techniciansworked and waited and superintended the computers which controlled theprocesses raging beyond them.
The long ship lifted steadily and majestically through the batteringstorm and the driving rain of dust and crystals. Out beyond the densespace that surrounds all stars, the long ship probed the ever-shiftingcurrents in the four-dimensional universe. The long ship found alow-density flaw, where space could hardly be said to exist at all. Thelong ship, described mathematically, was half as long as thecontinuum—the length being inversely proportional and related