Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

call the police. But I can throw you out. Now talk!”
    “Calm down, sonny. I just want to make a deal with you — wait, let me finish. We’re almost in the same boat, anyway. You want to go to space because you’ve always dreamed of what it would be like. I’ve been to space, and I . . .”
    In spite of himself, Pete was interested. “You’ve been to space?”
    “That’s what I said. Years ago, after the first couple of expeditions to the Jovian moons. That’s where I get my name. The Academy was a pretty new thing then, and if you had the guts you could go to space anyway. But they changed all that, you had to be an Academy graduate, and — bah! just because you wear a uniform an’ they taught you how to salute, that doesn’t mean you belong in space.”
    “No,” Pete admitted, “it doesn’t. But there’s a lot of intensive training.”
    “So what? The best training I ever knew was what you can get from experience. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. I said I have a proposition.”
    “I’m listening,” Pete said, “but that doesn’t mean I’ll agree to it.”
    “I work for a guy. You can work for him too. You’ll be working with men who go to space. . . .”
    “Academy graduates?” Pete did not believe him, and said so.
    “No! Who said other people don’t go to space, don’t put together their own ships with spit and string and fly ‘em despite injunctions? You got a lot to learn, sonny. Anyway, point is, you can be of help to our organization. We need an inside man, and you can got a job in the Spaceport. . . .”
    “Doing what?”
    Ganymede Gus shrugged eloquently. “We’re leaving that to you, sonny. You know your way around. We’ll need information on take-offs and schedules and things like that. No, don’t ask me what for. You just do your job, we’ll do ours.”
    “Such as what?”
    “Let me finish, sonny!”
    Pete paced back and forth, then said, “You’re wasting your time, because the answer is no. Now, get out.”
    “Temper, sonny. Temper —”
    But Pete had had enough. He pulled Ganymede Gus to his feet and drew his face close. The ex-spaceman struggled, but Pete was lithe and strong, and shook him.
    “That’s all!” he shouted angrily. “I don’t want any part of it. You can take your crooked schemes and — Get out! That’s all, just get out.”
    He propelled Ganymede Gus to the door, opened it, pushed the man through. “Maybe I’ve sunk low,” Pete muttered. “But not that low. Next time I see you, Mister, I’m going to start swinging!”
    Gus retreated and hustled down the stairs. Pete heard him laughing as he left, and all night he couldn’t get that laughter out of his ears.
    They wanted an “inside” man, Gus had said, someone to keep track of the blast-offs from White Sands. That way, it would be easy for them, incredibly easy. Their own ship, armed to the teeth, would wait somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon, intercepting the commercial liners out in deep space and looting their cargoes while the crew watched helplessly.
    On Earth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, piracy had faded away until it virtually disappeared. The sea-lanes became heavy with traffic and all pirates could do was cling grimly in the remote regions of the planet, pouncing out briefly and plundering recklessly before they were caught. But space was different. Space was new, unknown — and vast. You might send the entire space-navy out after one battered pirate cruiser and never find it in the bleak, shoreless gulf between the planets.
    And thus it was that the pirates prospered. They did not call themselves pirates any longer and they did not use the “Jolly Roger.” Even the term “hijacker” was obsolete, for piracy had become a refined profession. One ship plundered; another had a far rendezvous with it, took the cargo, altered it, and sold it on the frontier planets under the name of a legitimate trading organization. All very thorough — and