(2008) Mister Roberts Read Online Free Page A

display in a fighter plane)
various read-outs and images, such as external temperature, infra-red night
vision, power reserves and so on.
    Next,
the alien began to experiment gingerly with movement. He tilted his head and
the head of the robot moved, he moved his arms and the arms of the man moved
too. Satisfied, the alien took a step forward and the man in the business suit
strode clumsily off his podium and walked unsteadily out of the room.
    In the
time that the deserter had been in the Planetary Exploration Suit Room the
condition of the ship had deteriorated rapidly and she was now in an extremely
bad way As the alien in the robot suit crept along the corridor the concussions
grew worse, flames and gases spouted from ruptured pipes and exploding
machinery, occasionally the big man would have to step delicately over the body
of a crew member. Eventually the robot came to another door marked SHUTTLE
CRAFT BAY, this one guarded by a single nervous trooper who didn’t see the big
humanoid leaping at him until the last moment by which time it was much too
late to raise his weapon or cry out before his neck was broken by a single blow
from the power-assisted arm of the robot. Without pausing, the alien opened the
door to the shuttle bay, dragged the body of the guard inside and closed it
behind him.
    He was
now inside a large hangar within which were several small space craft, stubby,
inelegant little vessels used to ferry personnel between the battle cruiser and
nearby planets. The man climbed into the cockpit of one of these craft and
started it up.
    Outside
the Imperial cruiser the battle raged fiercer than ever. The ship was taking
hit after hit and while its laser cannon caught numerous attacking fighters,
sending them spinning away in a thousand fragments they were instantly replaced
by other incoming craft. In the midst of this fury the stolen shuttle came
nosing out into the heat of battle from an exit hatch. It hung for a second on
the skin of the mother ship, then with a burst of its jets, powered away from
the fighting at top speed.
    Soon
the battle was left far behind, and in minutes the tiny ship reached the edge
of the Earth’s atmosphere, the alien relaxed a little and began to consider
what he was going to do next. It dawned on him that he hadn’t really thought
through his escape plan that thoroughly While he’d been obsessed with getting
away from the doomed ship he hadn’t considered how he was going to live on
this foreign planet; from the reports he’d read on the ship’s central computer
he knew that the atmosphere was breathable and that with a few dietary
supplements he could eat the food, but he wondered what he was going to do with
his time, how was he going to keep himself amused? Seeing as every second of
his life up until that point had been ruled by the Empire, he thought he might
have to get some sort of a hobby.
    The
scaly alien need not have worried about what he was going to do once he was on
Earth, since from the moment he’d left the battlestar his movements had been
tracked by an X-wing fighter. As the shuttle touched the penumbra of the earth
the shadowing rebel craft let loose with its cannons. The little ship took hit
after hit and, mortally wounded, spun out of control. In a cloud of burning
gases it fell through the air towards the night-time side of the blue-green
planet.
     
    In Spain there is no
mention of Christmas holidays until mid-December but once they get going it can
sometimes seem as if they are never going to end. The semi-official beginning
is on the 22nd with the proclamation of El Gordo — the state lottery
known as ‘The Fat Boy’. The centrepiece is a five-hour TV show broadcast on the
number-one channel, during which the winning numbers are called out by orphans
from Madrid’s San Ildefonso school. It’s hard to believe that anywhere else in
the world you could have a television spectacular that was just a handful of
little orphaned boys chanting numbers