H. Beam Piper
Terro-Human Future History (Complete SF Omnibus)
Uller Uprising, Four-Day Planet, The Cosmic Computer, Space Viking, The Return, Little Fuzzy…
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2018 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-4439-3
Table of Contents
The Federation Series
Uller Uprising
I. Commander-in-Chief Front and Center
II. Rakkeed, Stalin, and the Rev. Keeluk
III. Four-and-Twenty Geek Heads
IV. If You Read It in Stanley-Browne
V. You Can Depend on It It's Wrong
VI. The Bad News Came After the Coffee
VII. Bismillah! How Dumb Can We Get?
VIII. Authority of Governor-General von Schlichten
IX. Don't Push Them Anywhere Put Them Back in the Bottle
X. The Geek Luftwaffe and the Kragan Airlift
XI. Of Princedoms Which Have Been Won by Conquest
XIII. A Bag of Tricks We Don't Have
XIV. The Reviewers Panned Hell Out of It
XV. A Place in my Heart for Hildegarde
Prologue
On Satan's Footstool
The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the contragravity field alternated on and off, occasionally varying its normal rate of five hundred to the second when some thermal updraft lifted the vehicle and the automatic radar-altimeter control acted to alter the frequency and lower it again. Sometimes it rocked slightly, like a boat on the water, and, in the big screen which served in lieu of a window at the front of the control cabin, the dingy-yellow landscape would seem to tilt a little. If unshielded human eyes could have endured the rays of Nu Puppis, Niflheim's primary, the whole scene would have appeared a vivid Saint Patrick's Day green, the effect of the blue-predominant light on the yellow atmosphere. The outside 'visor-pickup, however, was fitted with filters which blocked out the gamma-rays and X-rays and most of the ultra-violet-rays, and added the longer light-waves of red and orange which were absent, so that things looked much as they would have under the light of a G0-type star like Sol. The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the clouds were green-gray.
A thousand feet below, the local equivalent of a forest grew, the trees, topped with huge ragged leaves, looking like hundred-foot stalks of celery. There would be animal life down there, too—little round things, four inches across, like eight-legged crabs, gnawing at the vegetation, and bigger things, two feet long, with articulated shell-armor and sixteen legs, which fed on the smaller herbivores. Beyond, in the middleground, was open grassland, if one could so call a mat of wormlike colorless or pastel-tinted sprouts, and a river meandered through it. On the skyline, fifty miles away, was a range of low dunes and hills, none more than a thousand feet high.
No human