Throwing Snowballs at Xanadu
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About this ebook
Betty and Sam are the luckiest System Searchers in the universe! After months of cataloguing solar systems, they discover the very first Earth-normal planet! But as they ponder oddities in the native species as well as the planet itself, they find not one, but two comets are about to hit their paradise! And it'll be an Extinction Level Event! What can they do? What will they do? And can they do it in time? Join Betty, Sam and Charlie, the ship's computer, as they race against the clock to save this pristine world from certain distruction! Science fiction adventure at its best!
Bartholomew Thockmorton
Bartholomew James Thockmorton was born shortly after World War II in the burly, rural environs outside of Antsiranana. His ancestral family owned one of the larger cassava plantations, which his father managed. A small army of poor, itinerate laborers worked the fields and walked the cows when necessary. Although his mother was a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse for the kafirs working the plantation, she often closed school and helped with the family business. Before Bartholomew entered the first grade, his immediate family emigrated to the Americas seeking political asylum during a brief period of political unrest in their home province. Unwilling to enroll her son in a foreign school system, Misses Thockmorton home schooled young Bartholomew, teaching him to read using comic books and by continual recitations off the labels of various and sundry commercial products. This unorthodox methodology is credited to the boy's almost astounding ability to recall a staggering amount of obscure trivia and minutiae. Additionally, his mother's use of American television as an inexpensive and trusted babysitter led to the boy's later talent of usually being the only person in an occupied room that can recall the name of the foreign actor portraying the Cisco Kid (Duncan Renaldo). When the family returned home, Bartholomew enrolled in an academy for gifted children where he studied particle physics and animal husbandry. On his 18th birthday, he took a menial position aboard a tramp steamer, using it as free and convenient passage to the mother country. Upon arrival, he promptly used his undeserved citizenship to enlist in the Royal Navy, where his strapping physique and precise ability to speak intelligently while using large, unusual words led to his serendipitous assignment to special ops. Subsequently, Lieutenant Thockmorton participated in numerous clandestine campaigns abroad and on a multitude of contentious fronts. Completing his enlistment, he promptly returned home to assist with the family business. It was during this period, after a night of unrestrained drinking with a group of chums from his military days, that the still young Bartholomew accepted a wager to attempt a crossing of equatorial Africa with nothing more than the first 25-issues of Mark Evaniner's Groo the Wanderer. Which he did, with splendid aplomb. After a long and unsuccessful life of struggling to blend with the great, unwashed masses, Master Thockmorton now...
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Throwing Snowballs at Xanadu - Bartholomew Thockmorton
Throwing Snowballs at Xanadu
By Bartholomew Thockmorton
Copyright 2011 Bartholomew Thockmorton
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment; it may not be re-sold or given away to friends, family or acquaintances. And especially not to those people standing on the side of the street, lane, roadway, expressway, interstate or thoroughfare, or sometimes in the highway’s median, with those flimsy, greasy, poorly written cardboard signs with crayon lettering saying Will recite Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan for food…or money…or companionship.
If you want to give them money (or food) please feel free to do so…I mean, they took all that trouble to learn the poem, and it is rather long, so shouldn’t they get something for their effort? I wouldn’t recommend the companionship part, as there is no telling where they’ve been, or whom they’ve been with! If you feel compelled, or in dire need thereof, to share this book with others, please purchase an additional copy for each and every recipient. In fact, buy ten copies for each of them…that way, if they lose one, they’ll still have nine more as backup! You just can’t be too careful! Just giving free advice, you see…not like I’m in this for the money or anything. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy…or twenty…whatever. Thank you for respecting the hard work of Bartholomew Thockmorton.
And wash behind your ears, dad-nabbit!
This work is dedicated to Mama, who gave me my life-long love for Jack Kirby.
I miss you.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Thockmorton Territory
Chapter One
Somewhere in the unimaginably vast expanse of interstellar space, the fabric of reality rippled wildly, stretching inside out as the arriving warp-hole expanded, obscuring the background field stars in the absolute blackness of its event horizon. Spanning some three hundred meters, it stabilized with the barest shimmering of visible electromagnetic discharge at the edges. Moments later, the exploratory ship B.O.B. slid into normal space and the hole collapsed back to sub-Planck dimensions, vanishing into quantum virtual non-existence. On the vessel’s bridge, Samuel Roy Hinderken disengaged the warp generators, channeling the additional power to the graviton drive-shield while glancing over the read-outs, graphs and charts popping up on the monitors. Much of the information was routed directly to his cerebral-interface implants via the data-cable plugged into the socket behind his right ear, but some data still needed visual scanning; end-jumps were always a busy time for the pilot of a System Searcher. The primary viewer flickered to life, displaying a vista rich in stars, with one, many magnitudes brighter, centered in the screen.
All right…we’re through, Betty. How’s everything in engineering?
The voice activated inter-ship communication circuit freed his hands for the abundance of initial information flooding through the main board.
Peaches and cream,
came the cheerful replied. Probably the smoothest jump so far, Sammer-yammer. Engines and inertials held with less than a five-percent power deviance. Don’t know if it’s ‘cause you’re getting better, or if it has anything to do with this being our farthest leap yet.
Definitely my superior piloting skills,
replied Sam. He knew Betty would gladly engage him in verbal gymnastics. "And I’ll thank you to refer to me as Lord