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    End as a Hero: With linked Table of Contents
    End as a Hero: With linked Table of Contents
    End as a Hero: With linked Table of Contents
    Ebook62 pages44 minutes

    End as a Hero: With linked Table of Contents

    By Keith Laumer

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    About this ebook

    Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory—but for whom? Earth didn't trust his information. They were sure that he had been brain washed by the enemy. He had to convince them that he could be trusted before they killed him. But could he?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilder Publications, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 27, 2016
    ISBN9781515404712
    End as a Hero: With linked Table of Contents
    Author

    Keith Laumer

    John Keith Laumer (June 9, 1925 – January 23, 1993) was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the United States Air Force and a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service. His older brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Laumer's The Other Side of Time). Frank Laumer, their youngest brother, is a historian and writer.

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      Book preview

      End as a Hero - Keith Laumer

      End as a Hero

      by Keith Laumer

      Cover Image © Can Stock Photo Inc. / AlgolOnline

      Positronic Publishing

      PO Box 632

      Floyd VA 24091

      ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-0471-2

      First Positronic Publishing Edition

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Table of Contents

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      Granthan’s mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory—but for whom?

      *

      I

      In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake—and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.

      I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.

      I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch—the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn’t easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....

      There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary’s trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again....

      *

      I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm—well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn’t anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn’t amputated. I wasn’t complaining.

      As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool—if I survived.

      I was still a long way from home, and I hadn’t yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.

      I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition—with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull—I shouldn’t have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar’s CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here—and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.

      I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a

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