SELECTED FICTION WORKS
BY L. RON HUBBARD
FANTASY
The Case of the Friendly Corpse
Death’s Deputy
Fear
The Ghoul
The Indigestible Triton
Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep
Typewriter in the Sky
The Ultimate Adventure
SCIENCE FICTION
Battlefield Earth
The Conquest of Space
The End Is Not Yet
Final Blackout
The Kilkenny Cats
The Kingslayer
The Mission Earth Dekalogy*
Ole Doc Methuselah
To the Stars
ADVENTURE
The Hell Job series
WESTERN
Buckskin Brigades
Empty Saddles
Guns of Mark Jardine
Hot Lead Payoff
A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s
novellas and short stories is provided at the back.
*Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes
Published by
Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028
© 2014 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All rights reserved.
Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.
Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.
Horsemen illustration and Glossary illustration from Western Story Magazine and “When Gilhooly Was in Flower” story illustration from Romantic Range are © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and are used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-59212-620-0 EPUB version
ISBN 978-1-59212-790-0 Kindle version
ISBN 978-1-59212-372-8 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-343-8 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007928448
Contents
FOREWORD
TINHORN’S DAUGHTER
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN GILHOOLY WAS IN FLOWER
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
STORY PREVIEW
BRANDED OUTLAW
L. RON HUBBARD IN THE
GOLDEN AGE OF
PULP FICTION
THE STORIES FROM THE
GOLDEN AGE
GLOSSARY
FOREWORD
Stories from
Pulp Fiction’s
Golden Age
AND it was a golden age.
The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.
“Pulp” magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class “slick” magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the “rest of us,” adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.
The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.
In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.
Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: “The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.”
Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.
In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.
Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called “Hell Job,” in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.
Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pag
es of this volume.
This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.
Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.
L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.
Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a great story.
—Kevin J. Anderson
KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of more than ninety critically acclaimed works of speculative fiction, including The Saga of Seven Suns, the continuation of the Dune Chronicles with Brian Herbert, and his New York Times bestselling novelization of L. Ron Hubbard’s Ai! Pedrito!
Tinhorn’s Daughter
CHAPTER ONE
Kidnapped
EARLY that morning, when they had left the stage station, Betsy Trotwood had supposed that they would reach the clearly outlined Rockies by midmorning.
But at noon, the Rockies were just as far westward, apparently, as they had been at the start. And even now, with dusk coming on, the rolling Concord stage and its six chunky horses were just entering the foothills of the higher peaks beyond.
In truth, Montana was an amazing country, especially to a girl outside the city limits of Boston for the first time in her life. The land was so BIG, so lacking in people, so empty of women!
The Concord’s rumble and creak made small headway against the silent immensities and Betsy Trotwood thought that if she had to sit silent and alone much longer she would go mad.
The stage rolled into Twin Pines and the resulting commotion spared her sanity. Red-faced men in big hats, all dressed in stained leather, each one burdened with an enormous revolver and belt, gathered around the pausing stage for news.
The log stage station, scarred by arrows and bullets, looked very isolated, backed by the rearing foothills and dwarfed by the skyward rearing pines.
The half-dozen men had approached with loud, coarse shouts addressed to the messenger and driver, but Bat had scowled and jerked his thumb down and the crowd had instantly removed hats, shuffled, peered and had begun to walk around on tiptoe. They still wanted news but they asked for it in whispers.
Betsy Trotwood knew that she was the cause of this sensation but she could not understand it. They acted as though she were dead and on her way to a funeral.
Her appearance belied anything like that. Her voluminous skirts were patterned in gay little flowers and her ripply brimmed hat was tied under her chin with a bright blue ribbon.
Bat Connor, the messenger, climbed down from the box and went inside. He came back a moment later swiping his hairy hand across his bleached whiskers and looking guiltily toward Betsy to see if she had noticed anything wrong.
Horses were being changed as this last run from Twin Pines to Puma Pass would be completed before midnight, and while Tom, the sober-faced driver, tried to remember to swear under his breath as the horses were changed, Bat took advantage of the pause to shift his Winchester into the crook of his arm, put his boot on the step and converse with the passenger. He wanted the boys to see the intimate terms he was on with her.
“Ridin’ easy, miss?” said Bat, spraying a hub of tobacco juice.
“It is a little rough,” ventured Betsy.
“Won’t be no more stage when the railroad gets through here and across the Rockies,” volunteered Bat. “Steel’s better ridin’, I guess, but it shore looks like the country is gettin’ all settled up. You goin’ as far as Puma Pass, ain’t you, ma’am?”
“Yes, if my father is there,” said Betsy.
Bat turned to the crowd. “Slim Trotwood still in Puma Pass, boys?”
The group looked thunderstruck for an instant and then brightly nodded all together.
“He’s still in Puma Pass,” relayed Bat. “And we’ll git you there. Just you wait and see. Ain’t a road agent could ever get up nerve enough to hold up any stage of mine!”
“Road agent?” said Betsy, startled.
“Shore,” said Bat. “We call ’em road agents because they stops us where they ain’t no station, see? Bandits.”
“You mean there are robbers in these hills?”
Bat grinned confidently and patted his Winchester as though it were a cat. “Now don’t worry none about it, ma’am. You got me ridin’ the box.”
The station boss felt a little jealous of Bat’s intimacy. He growled, “Sunset Maloney wasn’t scared none the last time.”
“You’ve been held up?” said Betsy quickly.
The crowd was instantly all compassion again. She looked very small and very pretty and just now, scared.
“Aw, it ain’t often,” said the station boss.
“But you have been held up,” she insisted to Bat.
He looked uncomfortable and gnawed a chunk from a villainous black plug before he answered. “Well, yes. A young feller named Sunset Maloney’s been holdin’ up stages every time they’s a money sack goin’ in to your old man.”
“He’s been stealing from my father?”
“Sure. Slim Trotwood, as agent for the Great Western Railroad, is always havin’ a wad shipped in to him. In fact, we’re carryin’ one right now.”
Bat saw glory in his role. “Last time I put up a rarin’ fight and this time he won’t have nerve enough to come within six miles of the stage. You just trust to me, ma’am.”
“What sort of fellow is this Sunset Maloney?” said Betsy.
“Pretty wild,” replied Bat judicially. “Pretty wild. Faster’n a greased rattler with a six-gun. He’s ornery as a barrel of wildcats. But we won’t have no trouble.”
Tom was hitched up again and Bat dragged himself back to the box, Winchester prominently displayed. The half-dozen station men tipped their hats to Miss Trotwood and the Concord rolled on its dusty way again.
The horses labored as they pulled the long grade. The road began to wind around high hills, and far below, Betsy could see winding streams all silver with distance. The world was turning scarlet and gold as the sun dipped behind the backbone of the continent. But none of this warm beauty lightened Betsy’s heart.
She felt very small and helpless, shaken like a die in the otherwise empty coach. And now she had a new worry. Her father was losing his money to a road agent. Was that hurting the project about which he had waxed so enthusiastic?
She had never seen her father that she could remember. He had come from fully as good a Boston family as her mother, but he had never seemed to fit in the East. At least that was what her mother had said. Her other relatives had been less kind.
Betsy’s mother had not been dead half a year before her father had begun to communicate with Betsy. Relatives said that he was interested in the fortune her mother had left—as her mother’s purse had been trap-tight as long as she had lived. But Betsy had liked to think otherwise.
Her father had written many times that he was now an agent for the Great Western, the first railroad into Montana, but that he needed money to buy up the right-of-way in advance of construction. Puma Pass, he had said, had been selected as t
he only possible crossing of the Continental Divide and if he could buy this land for the railroad he would be rewarded.
It had seemed very good to Betsy. She had liked the feeling of importance his letter had given her. She had sent money and then more money and finally, as a surprise, she had come west, against all advice, to help her father in every way she could. He did not know she was coming, but in a matter of hours …
The brake shrieked; the coach lurched to an abrupt stop and almost threw Betsy headlong against her largest trunk, which had been too big to go outside.
She sat hastily back and righted her bonnet, while the dust caught up with the stage which had made it and curled smokily past the windows.
A voice so clear and so brutally cold that it made her tremble knifed the evening chill.
“Throw down your rifle, Bat!”
The dust thinned and Betsy, leaning sideways, looked ahead. A man on foot was standing across a newly felled tree which blocked the road. He was a terrifying sight to Betsy as he stood there balancing a huge revolver in each hand. His face was completely covered with a red bandanna into which two crude eyeholes had been cut. He was dressed in a white buckskin shirt, flaring chaps and high-heeled boots. He looked very tall, very grim.
Betsy wished fervently for Boston and its solid policemen. Up on the box were ten thousand dollars in silver and bills—her money destined for her father. And it would all be gone in an instant.
She twisted at her hat ribbon. Two bright tears welled up in her large blue eyes—tears of terror. This must be Sunset Maloney. He hated her father. What would he do when he found that she was also a Trotwood? Shoot her, most likely.
The tall man was stepping down from the tree. Bat’s Winchester rattled into the dust as he dropped it.
“Now, Sunset,” whined Bat. “Don’t go gittin’ nervous. I can’t reach no higher.” And in a hoarse whisper, “Git your hands up, Tom, you fool. T’hell with them horses.”
“What are you carrying?” said the clear, chill voice.
“Got it right here,” cried Bat, anxious to please. The express box hit the road leadenly.