Chapter I
Snaring a Trapper
The conference taking place in the New York offices of the London Interplanetary Zoo, on the top floor of the tremendous Walker Building, was not going well. The suite was built of the finest modern materials and equipped with all the comforts science could devise. Vacuum-brik walls shut out noise. There were mineral fluff insulation, Martian sound-absorbent rugs, plastic body-contour furniture, air conditioning. The press of a button brought iced drinks or lighted cigarettes of aromatic Venusian tobaccos through a recess in one wall.
Despite all these comforts, the visitor was having a bad time.
At one end of the room was a small screen. On a stand before it was the morning "newspaper," consisting of a tiny roll of film. Subscribers could turn on the latest news at any time by simply flashing it onto the screen. A dial enabled the reader to flip through the entire "paper" with a twist or two. Varicolored backgrounds--white for local news, green for foreign, yellow for sports, and so on--made it easy for the reader to turn to any desired section.
Right now it was turned to the pale violet interplanetary page.
GERRY CARLYLE CHALLENGED IN RACE TO SATURN!
London Zoo Contract at Stake as Prize for Victor!
N. Y. Sept. 4, UP. Scientific circles stirred with interest today as the supremacy of Gerry "Catch-'em-Alive'" Carlyle in the role of interplanetary trapper--the rigorous profession of capturing monstrous life-forms on our neighboring planets and returning with them alive for exhibition in Earthly zoos--was challenged by Prof. Erasmus Kurtt.
Miss Carlyle's contract with the London Interplanetary Zoo comes up for renewal soon. Prof. Kurtt suggested that so important a position should be given only to the one most fitted to hold it.
Intimating that he considered himself the better "man," Kurtt proposed a race with the rich L.I.Z. contract as the prize.
The contest would be decided on the basis of a journey to any designated planet, the capture of any designated monster thereon, and safe return to Earth under the racer's own power. First home with the creature alive and well would be declared the winner.
Prof. Kurtt suggested that the planet Saturn would afford sufficient difficulties to test the mettle of the contestants.
Speculation was rife...
The news item was switched off sharply, coincident with a sound, suspiciously like a female snort. Claude Weatherby, public relations director for the London Interplanetary Zoo, mopped his brow furtively. He felt that he would rather contend with the tantrums of any of the world's greatest collection of planetary monstrosities than with Gerry Carlyle's famous temperament.
Gerry was in an uncompromising mood. It was apparent in the set of her shoulders, the swing of her arms as she paced the office floor.
Visibly drawing upon his nerve, Weatherby tentatively resumed an argument.
"After all, my dear, it's only a publicity stunt. We appreciate that you are the outstanding personage in the business. Please be assured of that. We would never have consented to the race if we hadn't had absolute faith in your ability to defeat this fellow Kurtt."
"I understand all that," Gerry said coldly.
"Perhaps we should have consulted you before barging ahead with plans for a send-off ceremony with you and Kurtt. But, really, we were confident that your famous sportsmanship?"
"Spare me the crude flattery, Claude. You haven't told me all the circumstances surrounding this silly challenge. I like honesty. I make a point of being straightforward. Why don't you?"
Weatherby crimsoned and began to splutter. Gerry stopped him short with an imperious gesture.
"Here are the facts. The planetary hunters, of whom I am one, can be counted on your fingers. Another two or three, Claude, and you'd have to take off your shoes to count them. We form probably the most exclusive little coterie anywhere in the Solar System. The chance of anyone's possessing all the qualifications to become a successful trapper of monsters is literally one in millions.
"Now this fellow Kurtt--he's no more a professor than you are--is definitely not one of us. He's a small-time hanger-on, chiseling a few dollars by talking some sucker into financing him for short trips. There are two unexplained things. In the first place, none of the genuine hunters would have the appalling lack of ethics to try snaffling a fellow-member's job. It just isn't done.
"A man like Kurtt wouldn't dare suggest such a thing. He hasn't the--er--courage. Unless, of course, someone important egged him on. And secondly, where on Earth would a phony like Kurtt get the financing? This is big business, Claude, as you well know. The returns of a successful trip of mine may run close to a million dollars a year for the L.I.Z. But it also costs hundreds of thousands to carry out an expedition.
"As for the race--against Hallek or Moore or one of the others it would be fun. But to associate with a man of Kurtt's unsavory reputation is harmful to me and the Zoo. The whole thing--er?"
"It certainly doesn't smell good," interpolated a third voice.
Weatherby and the woman glanced at an easy chair in the corner. Barely visible were a pair of muscular, booted legs draped over the chair arm, and a cloud of pipe smoke. When it dissipated, the ruggedly good-looking face of Captain Tommy Strike, grinned sourly at them.
"Look, Claude," he explained. "What Gerry is asking, in her quaint way, is who's backing Kurtt?"
Weatherby hemmed and hawed, his British tact quite unequal to the task.
"Fact is--uh--we--ah--didn't realize ourselves who was behind Kurtt till after we'd agreed on the--uh--bally publicity stunt. The man behind?"
His voice petered out entirely. Gerry Carlyle gazed with rising consternation at Weatherby.
"Claude!" she cried. "You don't mean to say--It can't possibly be that horror from Hollywood on the Moon. Not Von Zorn again!"
"Well?" Weatherby made a defeated gesture and hunched his shoulders like a man about to be overwhelmed by a storm.
Gerry groaned in mortal anguish. Of all people in the System to be in her hair again, Von Zorn, czar of the motion picture business, was positively the least welcome. The feud between these two for the past few years had raged from Mercury to Jupiter, with skirmishes on the Moon, Venus, Almussen's Comet, and various wayside battlegrounds.
With Gerry, it was the matter of an ideal. She took it as a personal insult when Von Zorn's clever young technicians synthesized, for motion picture consumption, robot-controlled planetary monsters instead of using the real thing. She always loved to unload a roaring cargo of the genuine article just in time to show up the menace in Nine Planets Pictures' latest action epic as the wire and paper-mache creations they really were.
With Von Zorn, it was a matter of box office. There was no percentage in making high-budget films when Gerry was constantly turning them into low-gross productions by her genuine attractions at the L.I.Z.
By vigorously pacing across the room and back, Gerry tried to reduce her head of steam.
"So!" she finally burst out, and the syllable was like the bursting of an atomic bomb. "Old monkey-face hasn't had enough, eh? Still whetting his knife in case I turn my back. Thinks he'll run me out of business. Put one of his stooges in my place so he can dictate to the Zoo the way he dictates to those poor, deluded devils at Hollywood on the Moon!
"Well," Gerry continued in a voice that can only be described as a cultured snarl, "all right, I accept the challenge! And I can promise Kurtt and that sly simian, Von Zorn, a trouncing that they'll never forget!"
She strode to the visi-phone, snapped the lever. The eyes of the switchboard woman in the outer office stared frightenedly from the screen. Obviously she had been listening in through the interoffice communicator. Just as obviously, she held her employer in awe.
"Get me Barrows!" commanded Gerry peremptorily. "Get me Kranz. Rout out that whole slovenly, craven crew of mine. Tell 'em we've got things to do and places to go, if they could possibly spare a little time from their carousing."
Gerry paused to smile. No one knew better than she that her crew was neither slovenly nor cowardly. They were picked men, culled from the thousands of hopeful adventurers from everywhere who constantly besieged her in their desire to join. They were intelligent, highly trained, vigorous, and loyal to their beloved leader. Several in the past had given their lives for her.
Though they sometimes played a game of grumbling about Gerry's iron-handed rule, they fiercely resented any outsider's intimation that her leadership was anything short of perfect. They lived dangerously, and severe discipline was the price of survival. They were envied by red-blooded men everywhere, and they were proud of it.
Gerry tossed her head confidently and smiled.
"I think Mister Kurtt won't find any such team as mine to go to bat for him. As for you, Claude"--she gazed at him as she might regard some remarkable but slightly distasteful swamp-thing from Venus--"you may run along now. Whip up your excitement and publicity fanfares. Make ready for the colossal ceremony, the great race.
"You've inveigled me into this nonsense, and I'm agreeing only because it's a chance to hoist Von Zorn on his own petard. But it must be done on the grand scale, Claude. I want nothing petty?"
Gerry walked to the passage that led to her private suite and exited with a faintly grandiose air. When angry, she had a tendency to dramatize her anger. Weatherby shut his gaping mouth. He seized his hat with the attitude of a man who has just been reprieved from the gas chamber.
"Y'know," he said bewilderedly to Strike, "she's quite a changeable woman. Sometimes I think she's a bit difficult to fathom."
Tommy smiled as he held the outer door for Weatherby. It was the understanding smile of one who has just listened to a masterpiece of understatement.
"Quite," he agreed. "Rah-ther!"
)
THE SAGA OF A CLASSIC SF HEROINE CONCLUDES! Gerry Carlyle, the Interplanetary Huntress, who brought 'em back alive from the jungles of Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter in the golden days of the science fiction pulps, returns for a final outing, up against the most dangerous challenge of in the nine planets! When the sexist Professor Erasmus Kurtt insultingly challenges her to prove who is the "better man" in a race to Saturn and back to capture the planet's deadliest lifeform, with whoever returns to Earth with it first the winner, Gerry's blood boils--and its off for Saturn, with her fiancee, Tommy Strike, at the helm of her atom-powered rocketship, The Ark. But, Erasmus Kurtt is no professor, but a ruthless-schemer with a secret plan of his own. Soon, the Interplanetary Huntress soon finds herself marooned on Saturn, her ship sabotaged, while she must lead her crew into barehanded battle against the sharp-clawed, ten-foot Dermaphos, the eight-legged Kite, and the superdeadly Gora. Treachery, secrets, a friendly alien race, and a last minute battle against monsters that tests Gerry Carlyle's knowledge and skills to the limit show why Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine said, "?This will take you back to the good old days of S-F ?The heyday of Gerry Carlyle, the fabulously gorgeous interplanetary hunter ... sizzling stuff ... surprisingly readable. If you like a huge collection of assorted BEMs and well-thought-out gimmicks in tight situations, you will assuredly go for this." Out-of-print for over fifty years The Interplanetary Huntress' Last Case is the third and final volume in the Renaissance E Books republication of the adventures of the fabulous Gerry Carlyle.
