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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Senior Controller Dag Fletcher was involved as soon as Interstellar Two Nine disappeared in the gravisphere of Bromius. There must have been more to the loss of the starship than navigational error or mechanical failure. An ethnological mission couldn't have got into that much trouble. This was an ideal opportunity to get back in the thick of the action, and put Hulda out of his mind once and for all. He knew the Bromusians as a cheerful and sociable race and it seemed unlikely and quite incredible they might be involved in interplanetary intrigue. But then again, Hulda was part Bromusian.

eBook Publisher: Golden Apple, Wallasey, Published: USA, 1973
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2004

This eBook is part of the following series:

• John Rankine's Dag Fletcher Galactic Series

19 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [203 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [208 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [172 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [612 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [195 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [293 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [221 KB] , hiebook (KML) [469 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [250 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [160 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [198 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [247 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [260 KB]
Words: 58187
Reading time: 166-232 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

There was always work. Rumour had it that it was great therapy.

Senior Controller Dag Fletcher had doubts about that one.

He moved irritably from his desk, crossed his grey wall-to-wall carpet, leaned with both hands flat on the warm glass of his solar window and looked out from his eyrie in the European Space Corporation ziggurat.

Three times he had played a detailed report on his pianola with every refined statistical ploy, and the facts refused to shake down into any kind of pattern.

He told himself he was behaving like an adolescent; that it was flatly against every rule of self-management to emotionalise on experience that was past and gone and that life was one thing after another; that he should duly identify that next thing and leap after it like a hound dog: but it was all for the birds.

The Bromusian Commissar Hulda was still there present in his mind's eye, an unfading eidetic image, eyes warm and affirmative, left side bare to the waist in her people's traditional dress, symbolizing the open heart free from guile.

His sense of loss was greater because he knew that it would finally pass. But reacting to it as of now, he judged that he had used up his ration of sensitivity for the day. To be expected to flip like a twig about the flight schedule of an overdue starship was too much.

On the other hand, it was what he was paid for. The difficult ones stopped at his desk. They had no place else to go.