The Ramsgate Paradox

Jerry eBooksNo copyright 2023 by Jerry eBooksNo rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone. San Carves the BeastSan adjusted quickly to Pegleg’s flash. He darted forward, his curved knife in his left hand. Two slingmen followed him, knives glittering. They pounced on the great coils with their homy feet, holding down the front end of the creature while San’s knife probed and ripped under the scales behind the mutilated head. In a moment the head sagged, although the yards of heavy body behind it kept up an uncoordinated lashing. This soon changed to a series of shudders, and then the thing lay still.San looked coldly at the thick, dark blue blood on his knife, and at the long heavy cylinder of the monster’s body. In the smashed head, imposing rows of sharp teeth showed.“Attar!” San said. “Volloon attar!” By the Same AuthorSTARDUST VOYAGES For Leslie and Steve and Judy(since this is usually the order in which they read Dad’s stories)Copyright © 1976, by Crompton N. CrookAll rights reservedPublished by arrangement with the author’s agent.All rights reserved which includes the rightto reproduce this book or portions thereof inany form whatsoever. For information addressLurton Blassingame60 East 42nd StreetNew York, N.Y. 10017SBN 425-03186-0BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published byBerkley Publishing Corporation200 Madison A venueNew York, N. Y. 10016BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK ® TM 757,375Printed in the United States of America Part I The Slingmen of Hadorn Part II The Volloon Part III Earth’s First Sowing . . . Part IThe Slingmen of Hadorn Chapter 1The planet lay beneath us. We had matched orbital speed with its speed of rotation and so hung poised, without apparent progress, a thousand miles above the planet’s surface. Cameras were recording in our usual meticulous fashion. All our electronic sensors were operating, collating all energy emissions from the world below, synthesizing, analyzing. Before we go down, we know what to expect, what we’re up against. I think we do a good job.There’s a place on the side of the Stardust where, when the time and conditions are right, plates of the impervious skin of the starship slide smoothly back and a transparent blister extrudes. In this blister, surrounded on three sides by space, Ursula Potts sits at her easel and paints. When a planet is being analyzed from orbit, the little transparent studio is always out.Among our highly trained personnel and sophisticated equipment, Ursula Potts is an enigma. The Earth calendar above my desk said 2127, but Ursula looks like 1915. With her witch’s face, strange pale eyes, great bun of gray hair on the back of her head, and skinny clawlike hands, Ursula would have been at home in anybody’s nightmares.Still, we could have done without a lot of the complicated analytical equipment, if we’d had to. But we had come to depend on Ursula. Those strange eyes saw the truth, and those skinny hands put it on canvas with a weird and uncanny genius.“Something screwy, Roscoe.”Ursula’s painting didn’t look like our view of the planet below. But that wasn’t unusual. Often they don’t. The paintings are Ursula’s interpretation of the situation.“Looks good to me.”From a thousand miles we could see a sizable stretch of the planet’s curved surface. Practiced eyes could pick up mountain ranges, high and rugged, forest land, plains, extensive water. Zoom lenses showed vegetation variety. Spectroscopes had verified an oxygen-rich atmosphere.Ursula’s painting implied these things. It still looked funny, though.“Color,” Ursula said.Then I got it. I realized why the painting looked queer. It was blue. All blue. Sure, there were many shades, many intensities, but that’s all they were. Only one color. An ancient painter, Maxfield Parrish, would have flipped over it. But to me, when I looked closely, it was strangely depressing.“I see colors,” I protested.I did, too. The planet glowed with color. Almost more than was usual from this distance. Snow-capped peaks, the stretches of water, and particularly the cloud masses blazed with yellows and oranges, violets and scarlets.“Just it,” Ursula said. “They’re all here. None down there.”“How can you tell?” I didn’t challenge her. By now I knew not to.Ursula turned her pale eyes on me.“Feel it,” she said. “Way it’s got to be. Don’t know why.”“Kind of tosses it back in our laps, doesn’t it?” I said. “It’s up to us to find out. Right?”“Always is,” Ursula said.That was so, too. Ursula’s job was to paint; we, the researchers, did the investigating. Me, ecologist; Pegleg Williams, geologist; my gorgeous wife Lindy, microbiologist; Jim Peters, animal biologist; Winkie Heffelfinger, botanist; and so on. Sometimes it was hard to say just what kinds of scientists were needed on some of the problems we faced. Certainly botanist, zoologist, and the like frequently weren’t very meaningful.I took a last look at Ursula’s painting, slid back the door to the lock beyond the blister. Ursula’s voice stopped me.“Roscoe,” she said, “it’s not as simple as it looks.”She scarcely looked my way and went back to her work almost as if I weren’t there. But, for some reason, I felt a small chill as I stepped through the door.“Dr. Kissinger! Dr. Kissinger!” An intercom outlet was whispering from the corridor wall near my ear. “Dr. Rasmussen calling Dr. Kissinger. Where’re you hiding, Roscoe?”I punched the button.“Roscoe here, Johnny.”“Want to come to Main? We’ll be dropping in before long. Do you know where you’d like to go first?”“On my way, Johnny.”Dr. Johannes Rasmussen was the last character you’d ever choose to command a starship. Tall, lean, courtly, precise, he wore waxed moustaches and dressed for dinner even when he ate alone, which he did fairly often. Fluent in many tongues, he spoke clipped English unless his listener just plain couldn’t understand it. Make no mistake about it, though: Johnny ran the Stardust.There were luxury seats in Main Observation. The ten big viewscreens could be controlled from any chair. Cap’n Jules Griffin sat at ease in one, enjoying one