The Five Gold Bands Read Online Free PDF Page A

and Paddy Blackthorn standing on the deck-covering of crisp scarlet eggshell pile.
    Paddy clapped his arms to his sides, grinned with honest joy. Not only was he free with his life—enough to rejoice about—but he had played a devastating joke on his would-be slayers. A magnificent joke to make his name one for history. It was the pattern of circumstances that exactly filled a socket in the human brain, the biter bit, the bully tripped up by the underdog in a gutter full of slops.
    Paddy strolled here and there, surveyed his prize. It seemed to be engineered less for cruising than for use as an interplanetary pleasure-boat. It carried no large supply of stores, no arsenal.
    The fittings were of a quality and precision befitting the ceremonial boat of the Sons of Langtry. The joinerwork was a rare wood from a far planet, showing a grain of black and golden-green. There was a brown-violet matanne upholstery on the couch and the scarlet carpet with the pile that was like stepping on candied rose-petals.
    Paddy returned to the pilot’s platform, studied the astrogation instruments. A boat of this type, with no cost spared on its construction would embody new equipment, much of which might be unfamiliar to him. And as he glanced along the panel he found levers, dials, arms, whose use he did not comprehend. He left them untouched. For all he knew one might set off an emergency SOS call.
    He turned to the wide couch, inspected the shiny heap of his loot—five bands of gold, each with a thin square compartment. Paddy stood back with a sensation close to awe. “Here,” he said, “is the treasure of the ages, which all the wealth of Earth would buy cheap… And it’s me, Paddy Blackthorn, who handles these lovelies.
    “But now let’s open them and we’ll see how to curl space-drive into them shiny tubes so next time there won’t be that great explosion…”
    He snapped off the lid of the first, withdrew a bit of stiff parchment. It was imprinted with heavy Badaic letters:
The Kamborogian Arrowhead Suite 10
The Foolish Man’s Inclination Page 100
    Paddy raised his eyebrows high. “And what’s this?” He was thunderstruck, apprehensive. Was there some colossal error?
    “Ah, well,” said Paddy, “now we’ll see.” He opened the second band.
    Like the first it contained a bit of parchment, written in Pherasic script which Paddy could not read. He passed on to the third, which was stamped with the neat Shaul cuneiform:
Corescens, the back wall.
Three up, two over
Irradiate with angstroms 685, 1444, 2590, 3001.
Photograph.
    Paddy groaned, opened the fourth band. It held a key, engraved with the Loristanese loops and lines, nothing more. Paddy tossed it aside.
    The parchment in the Koton band read:
The Plain of Thish, where Arma-Geth
shows the heroes to the wondering stars.
Under my mighty right hand.
    Paddy flung himself back on the couch. “A bloody treasure-hunt, that’s what!” he cried. “And to think I’ve risked all for the only clues. Well, then, by Fergus, I’ll fling them from the port and have done with it!”
    But he folded the four parchment slips carefully around the key, and replaced them in one of the bands, which he fitted on his own wrist.
    “Now for home.” thought Paddy. “Peace and quiet and no more of this space-rampaging—and yet—” He rubbed his chin dubiously. He was by no means safe. He had escaped the asteroid with his skin, but the Langtry ships swarmed space like wasps in a shed.
    He was safe from the rear. But was he safe from interception? Space-wave messages flew as swiftly as thought. The description of the boat and Paddy’s personal coordinates would reach every outpost in space. Paddy would be the quarry of the universe. Ordinary misdeeds would go unchallenged while the authorities combed the worlds for Paddy Blackthorn.
    Exultation waned to fretful uneasiness. In his mind’s-eye he saw the placards, tacked up in every saloon, every post office, every transportation agency