A Bow To Malthus
by
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The lander was a powerfully-engined, bubble-shaped machine, capable of two hours of sustained operation at speeds of over eighty miles per hour. Seats were provided for the pilot and three passengers. With crowding, one or two more could be accommodated. Its stubby wings were a fuel saver for operation within an atmosphere. Its turbo prop could function like an old fashioned twentieth century airplane or, when rotated to overhead, as a helicopter. The wings folded and the fuselage was collapsible for storage in the mother ship. The development of this hybrid craft was at the insistence of Henry Collier who wanted range and durability. A conventional jet or rocket lander would have required ten to twenty times the fuel space for multiple, extended missions. The Earth two carried two such landers.
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“Cut his throat, Hatmo ordered as he hurried on to his house with Kursel struggling to keep up.
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About the Book
With the late twenty-first century development of a practical ion-propulsion rocket engine capable of speeds in the neighborhood of speed-of-light, America was ready for its first cautious steps into space exploration. At circa 4.2 light years from the sun, Alpha Centauri is the Solar System’s nearest neighbor in the Milky Way Galaxy, a two hundred billion star conglomerate arranged in a flat spiral estimated to have a width of 100 thousand light years with a depth of 10 thousand light years. Army major Henry Collier and five crew hoped to find life on one of the six probe-identified planets of their destination star.
The chosen planet was much the same as Earth in size and distance from its star, conditions necessary to the development of the sort of flora and fauna we know on Earth. These assumptions follow from man’s analysis of the known Universe, its commonly found 97/98 elements, and their physical reaction to one another. The jackpot was the great fortune in finding a planetary match with the Earthling’s first cast into space’s mysterious depths. However, the life that Collier and Doctor Grace Fielding found was almost too rich for their blood.
After depositing Collier and his doctor colleague in open scrub country; for safety, collier sent the lander back to the mothership. A prescient action. Ten minutes following the lander’s departure, Grace and Collier were prisoners of a mounted troop of barbarians. Meanwhile, more civilized portions of the planet Trello were preparing for war that would bring its two major powers into a struggle for dominance.
About the Author
Bidwell Moore has traveled and resided widely in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Mediterranean Africa. In Switzerland he served as an assistant military attaché; later he held intelligence posts in Washington.