Linford Mystery
20 total works
Instead of the welcome they'd expected, the returning crew of the first interstellar spaceship were kept in space, imprisoned in their craft. In quarantine, as carriers of a deadly alien disease!
When the prisoners escaped, the worried authorities hired Earth's top detective Martin Slade to track them down, little suspecting that Slade had his own personal agenda to find the men. Slade's search for the missing crew spans millions of miles of space, following a trail of hideous deaths . . .
By order of the World Council, a vast chain of towers was being constructed across the globe. The people were told that the towers would provide free universal power from broadcast energy. When Statander, a member of the World Council, questioned their construction, he was assassinated to ensure his silence.
But there was one other who shared Statander's suspicion - Altair the Thief, whose father had also been killed for a similar reason. Just one man, a criminal and a fugitive, but a man determined to uncover the monstrous secret that had led to their deaths . . . the secret of the towers!
Marcus King, ruthless entrepreneur and commercial giant, was a man obsessed. His obsession-staying alive! He used his millions to buy life from the bodies of others. Then someone devised a highly scientific plan to kill him-only for King to survive the attack, and plan his revenge. But who was the mastermind behind the assassination attempt?
Dale Markham, chief of local police, is quickly on the crime scene. But the case is so bizarre, with far-reaching international implications, that Security is also called in and special agent Steve Delmonte is assigned to work with the police.
Delmonte's investigations uncover a tangled web of sadistic intrigue and he has to follows a trail of further murders all the way to the moon before the incredible truth behind the attack is revealed.
Britain, years after the Debacle, and a new London has risen phoenix-like from near the ashes. Though Londoners have retained their physical purity through the ruthless destruction of generations of mutants, man is no longer the same, and society crueller. Cynicism and a whole-hearted recognition of the absolute power of money has replaced humanism, and a belief in reincarnation has replaced religion and the old moral code of 'doing unto others . . .' The individual can exist, has a right to exist, only if he is selfish.
Death is a Dream is the story of three survivors from the twentieth century who awake from suspended animation in The Cradle to find themselves unemployable, and unfit to live by virtue of their commitments to out-dated ideals. As well as being an investigation of the form society may take after an atomic war, it is, by association, an indictment of society as it is now.
Far from Earth, on a ship carrying the 13th and 14th generations of descendants from the original crew, life is short. You are born, learn the tasks needed to keep the ship running, help breed and train the next crew - and your death is ordered by the computer in charge.
Gregson, chief of the psych-police, makes sure the computer's death-sentences are carried out quickly and painlessly. His duty is a sacred trust. He knows the intricacies of the system, how it works . . . and how it can be subverted.
He is growing old. Rebellious.
He also knows his name will soon come up in the computer for elimination.
And he has no intention of carrying out his own death-sentence!
The ship rose on a column of invisible, super-heated steam ejected at incredible velocity. The spread of the blast flattened everything in the immediate vicinity. The surrounding town was wiped out.
Immediately on blast off the automatic pilot engaged hi-drive to avoid the attacking missile. This put the ship into negative mass with relation to the normal universe. It was now in M-space.
The ship was self-contained. It could keep going till all her occupants died of old age. But where to? Proxima Centauri? Or maybe Alpha Centauri, Riga, perhaps, or Sirius! The universe is a big space.
They hurtled on through space and time until they saw the planet, a cloud-hidden ball, as it hung in space a hundred thousand miles below the orbiting vessel. It had seas and clouds, mountains and ice-caps, islands and continents, It had a moon and a yellow G-type sun.
Home? Was this their second chance?
On the airless surface of the Moon the 'cold war' continues, with the bases of the major world powers watching each other and waiting . . .
The dedicated personnel of Britain's Moon Base seemed well-adjusted to their peculiar existence despite a series of mysterious happenings. What bothers them most is the visit of a Royal Commission sent by an economically-worried British Government to investigate expenditure. Travelling with the Commission, but under separate and secret orders, is Felix Larsen, who's investigations are of quite a different nature.
Larsen, alive to the possibilities of espionage, soon finds himself faced with the inexplicable. Why should one man fall a thousand feet and escape with minor bruises while another dies after falling a mere eighteen inches? Why does a desperate man, bent on suicide and with all the means at hand, find it absolutely impossible to kill himself? What are the strange messages emanating from the Base - and from whence do they come? And what is the fantastic thing that has been conceived in the research department?
"We talk of good luck and bad luck. We even wear, some of us, good luck charms and we tend to select certain lucky numbers if we enter a raffle. No, Norman, you can't tell me that we don't acknowledge the existence of something we call luck."
The world, indeed the Universe, is surrounded by intangible energies of which man has, at present, only the vaguest notions. Electricity is such a force. Magnetism, gravitation . . . all once-unsuspected natural forces, now known for the realities they are. And so why not luck?
And once the possibility of luck being an actual force is recognised the next step is obvious - a machine to harness its forces.
But if one man can attract the good luck, someone, somewhere is due for bad luck. When the machine falls into the wrong hands, the inventors begin to wish they'd stuck to rabbits' feet and black cats . . .
England was starving when cheap power could have saved her . . . power that would have been available if atomic research had not been forbidden by the watchful League of Peace . . .
But two scientists chose to ignore this ban, and soon they launched an experiment-an experiment that succeeded too well, and got out of hand, spreading a tide of black death across the country, threatening the whole planet.
Neil Hammond, secret agent for the League of Peace, is sent to investigate, and uncovers a terrifying secret . . .
Sam Falkirk, Captain of the World Police and stationed at the World Council building in New York, has a special interest in investigating the sudden and inexplicable death of Angelo Augustine, the brother of his girl friend. A messenger employed by the Council, Augustine was also a spy in the pay of Senator Rayburn, a fanatical Nationalist who is fighting both to retain his power and to destroy the Orient before they, as he believes, turn against the Occident.
Augustine had died while delivering a parcel containing a statue of a Buddha for an employee of Senator Sucamari of the Japanese Legation, and who, in his own way, is as fanatical as Rayburn himself. Sucamari wants to gain living room for the teeming millions of the Orient, and his secret plan involves the releasing of a deadly bacterial plague across the Americas. The bacteria is contained in a special coating on the Buddha statue, but when the statue is stolen by a petty criminal, millions of people hover on the brink of agonizing death, unless Falkirk can find the criminal in time . . .
Over a dozen spaceships had disappeared into hyperspace, never to return. The lost vessels included the Jason, the Starbird, and the Invincible. Everyone assumed that they had fallen victim to some mechanical failure. But the mystery deepened when the Invincible was found drifting in space, six months after vanishing. The ship's engines were undamaged, the hull intact - but there was no trace of any living thing aboard; living or dead. No trace of its crew or the two hundred passengers. The ship was deserted!
Something had happened to the ship, to the passengers and crew. Something in hyperspace - or somebody!
Atomic war! Men had started the war, overriding the desires of their women and plunging the world into an orgy of destruction. Finally, when the vast armies of men had finally been shattered, women took over as rulers.
Under successive Matriarchs, the world was slowly recovering, diverting the vast war potential to peaceful purposes. To keep the world free of war, the Matriarch employed official assassins under the chief of Security Police. It was felt that the death of one person was an acceptable price to preserve the lives of many. But when the Matriarch ordered the assassination of Don Burgarde, an apparently harmless young man, her personal secretary, Lyra, decided to intervene.
The seeds of rebellion had been sown...
The first exploratory expedition to Pluto returns with only one crewman aboard-the Captain, Jules Carmodine. There is a profound mystery as to what has happened to the original crew: Carmodine is suffering from an amnesiac block, and is broken in health-almost insane, and full of self-loathing.
Medical treatment restores his health but the amnesia as to what had happened on Pluto remains. Carmodine is then forced to go back on a second expedition to Pluto to exorcise his tortured memories of abandoning his crew. And unless he can remember what happened, the second expedition will fall victim to whatever decimated the first. It is a journey he does not wish to make-a journey into terror!
Kerron and his business associates, Chang and Forrest, were three of the richest men on Earth. Now old and approaching the end of their days, they were desperate to prolong their lives. And there was one man who seemed to possess the secret of immortality-the mysterious Brett, a tall adventurer who had apparently lived for centuries.
So the three men paid a fortune to the one man they believed could help them, But Brett had a dark secret, and he in turn made a bargain with them, They had to accompany him on the strangest and most dangerous journey ever undertaken - to the very centre of the Galaxy - beyond the Wall!
Captain Baron, space pilot, is forced to abandon his ship, waiting for a rescue that does not come. Eventually he dies in space, his body frozen and perfectly preserved. Five years later, he is found, and two doctors, Le Maitre and Whitney, restore him to life using an experimental surgical technique.
Returning to Earth, Baron finds that he has been declared legally dead, his commission rescinded, and all his possessions reverted to the State. His only asset is the novelty and notoriety of being a Resurrected Man, and when this is ruthlessly exploited by others, he commits murder and becomes a fugitive from the police. Inspector McMillan enlists the help of Dr. Whitney to track him down, but their task is complicated by the fact that Baron is no longer quite human . . .