The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dead World, by Jack Douglas

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Title: Dead World

Author: Jack Douglas

Illustrator: Barr

Release Date: December 26, 2008 [EBook #27631]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

DEAD WORLD

By JACK DOUGLAS

Illustrated by BARR

_Out on the ice-buried planet, Commander Red Stone led his Free
Companions to almost certain death. They died for a dangerous dream
that had only one chance in a thousand trillion to come true. Is
there a better reason for dying?_

_... although the most recent star to die, RNAC 89778 in the distant
Menelaus galaxy (common name, Menelaus XII), had eight inhabited
planets, only some one thousand people of the fifth planet escaped and
survived as a result of a computer error which miscalculated the exact
time by two years. Due to basic psycho-philo maladjustments the refugees
of Menelaus XII-5 are classified as anti-social-types-B-6 and must be
considered unstable. All anti-social-types-B-6 are barred from
responsible positions in United Galaxies by order of the Inter-Galactic
Council._

--Short History of The United Galaxies

* * * * *

Yuan Saltario started it. He was serving in my Company and he was one of
them. A Menelaus XII-5 "unstable," and don't ever call that damned
little planet by its number if you meet one of them. They call it
Nova-Maurania. But you won't meet one of them. Or maybe you will, maybe
they did make it. I like to think they did.

There were a lot of them in the Companies in 3078. Restless men. The
Companies were the logical place for them. We're still classified
anti-social-B-6, too. Every year it's harder to get recruits, but we
still have to be careful who we take in. We took Yuan Saltario. There
was something about him from the very start.

"Why do you want to join a Free Company?" He was a short, humanoid type
with deep black eyes and a thin, lipless mouth that never sm