The Far Traveler
John Grimes had become that golden vessel's captain. A captain in name only because nobody could talk back to Big Sister or the haughty beauty who owned everything aboard. But Grimes was a man of many resources and lost space colonies were places that did not observe the civilized rules. You could be sure therefore that the man known as the Commodore Hornblower of Outer Space would be likely to come through okay—even if the ladies—mechanical and physical-never expected him to! |
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. First printing, February 1979 |
ISBN-13: 978-0-87997-444-2
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Dedication To all far travelers.
The dreams changed. There were, as before, memories from the minds of the colonists who had long lived in symbiosis with the fungus but now there were other memories—brief flashes, indistinct at first but all the time increasing in clarity and duration. There were glimpses of the faces and the bodies of women whom Grimes had known. The women . . . And the ships. Lines from a long-ago read and long-ago forgotten piece of verse drifted through Grimes' mind:
He was sitting in the control room of his first command, a little Serpent Class courier, a king at last even though his realm, to others, was a very insignificant one. Obedient to the touch of his fingers on the console the tiny ship lifted.
And through the dream, louder and louder, surged the arythmic hammering of a spaceship's inertial drive . . . . |
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The Far Traveler was hardly the sort of starship to use in the study of lost space colonies. Lost colonies were likely to be desperate, eccentric, and otherwise unappreciative. And The Far Traveler was a rich woman's toy, constructed of gold, and directed by an omniscient, dictatorial and feminine computer known as Big Sister.