The Passing of Ku Sui

A Complete Novelette

By Anthony Gilmore

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

The Plan

Like a projectile Hawk Carse shot out in a direction away from Earth.

The career of Hawk Carse, taken broadly, divides itself into three main phases, and it is with the Ku Sui adventures of the second phase that we have been concerned in this intimate narrative. John Sewell, the historian, baldly condenses those adventures of a century ago together, but on research and closer scrutiny they take on an individuality and significance deserving of separate treatment, and this they have been given here. For fictionized presentation, we have spaced the adventures into four connected episodes, four acts of a vibrant drama which ranged clear from Saturn to Earth, the core of which was the feud between Captain Carse and the power-lusting Eurasian scientist, Dr. Ku Sui—that feud the reverberations of whose terrible settling still echo over the solar system—and in this last act of the drama, set out below, we come to its spectacular climax.

The words of John Sewell's epic history sit lightly on paper; easy words for Sewell, once the collection of data was over, to write; not very significant words for the uninitiated and casual reader who does not see the irresistible forces beneath them. But consider the full meaning of these words, and glance for a moment at the two figures conjured up by them. We see Hawk Carse, a man slender in build, but with gray eyes and lithe, strong-fingered hands and cold, intent face that give the clue to the steel of him; we see Dr. Ku Sui, tall, suave, unhurried, formed as though by a master sculptor, in whose rare green eyes slumbered the soul of a tiger, notwithstanding the courtesy and the grace that masked always his most infamous moves. These two we see looming through and dwarfing Sewell's words as they face each other, for they were probably the most bitter, and certainly the most spectacular, foe-men of that raw period before the patrol ships swept up from the home of man to lay Earth's laws through space.

Carse and Ku Sui, adventurer and scientist, each with his own distinctive strength and his own unyielding character—those two were star-crossed, fated to be foes, and whenever they met there was blood, and never was quarter asked nor quarter expected. How could it have been otherwise? Ku Sui controlled the isuan drug trade, and Carse was against it, as he was against everything underhanded and unclean; Ku Sui had tricked and, by a single deed, driven Carse's loved comrade, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow, from his honored position on Earth, and Carse was sworn to bring Ku Sui to Earth to clear the old scientist's name. Either of these alone was enough to seal the feud, but there was more. Carse was sworn to release from their bondage of life-in-death Ku Sui's most prized possession, his storehouse of wisdom—the brains of five great Earth scientists, kept alive though their bodies were dead.

These, then, were the forces glossed over so lightly by John Sewell's words. These the forces that clashed in the episode set out below: that clashed, then drew apart, and knew not one another for years....

t will be recalled that, in the second of these four episodes, "The Affair of the Brains,"[1] Hawk Carse, Eliot Leithgow, and the Negro Friday broke free from Dr. Ku's secret lair, his outwardly invisible asteroid, and in doing so thought they had destroyed