The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Bluff of the Hawk, by Anthony Gilmore

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Title: The Bluff of the Hawk

Author: Anthony Gilmore

Release Date: July 3, 2009 [EBook #29298]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed
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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Astounding Stories May 1932.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

[Illustration: _Nothing there could withstand him._]

The Bluff of the Hawk

By Anthony Gilmore

* * * * *

[Sidenote: "A trick? Carse was famed for them. A trap? But how?"]

Had not old John Sewell, the historian, recognized Hawk Carse for what
he was--a creator of new space-frontiers, pioneer of vast territories
for commerce, molder of history through his long feud with the
powerful Eurasian scientist, Ku Sui--the adventurer would doubtless
have passed into oblivion like other long-forgotten spacemen. We have
Sewell's industry to thank for our basic knowledge of Carse. His
"Space-Frontiers of the Last Century" is a thorough work and the
accepted standard, but even it had of necessity to be compressed, and
many meaty episodes of the Hawk's life go almost unmentioned. For
instance, Sewell gives a rough synopsis of "The Affair of the Brains,"
but dismisses its aftermath entirely, in the following fashion (Vol.
II, pp. 25O-251):

"... there was only one way out: to smash the great dome
covering one end of the asteroid and so release the
life-sustaining air inside. Captain Carse achieved this by
sending the space-ship _Scorpion_ crashing through the dome
unmanned, and he, Friday and Eliot Leithgow were caught up
in the out-rushing flood of air and catapulted into space,
free of the dome and Dr. Ku Sui. Clad as they were in the
latter's self-propulsive space-suits, they