The Return of Nathan Brazil

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This one is for the old gang:

Alan Mole, Harry Brashear, Mike Leib, John Yox, and Bernard Zerwitz, all of whom, including me, turned out a hell of a lot better than anybody would have had a right to expect…

It would have been far easier for Har Bateen to conquer the world if he had had a cold. Unfortunately, the Dreel automatically cleaned up the bodies they used; so this time conquest had to be the hard way.

Slabansport was a typical frontier capital; the spaceport was small but modern, mainly used by orbital shuttles ferrying imports from the huge freighters that called regularly. Near it, of course, were the bars and dives common to any port, as well as the warehouses, shipping centers, and local headquarters of the companies that fueled the opening of the frontier. The town itself, the largest on Parkatin, held barely twenty thousand. That would change, of course; already the burnt, brown deserts had bloomed for a thousand kilometers around Slabansport as imported soils and pipelines from distant water sources provided the moisture it craved. Parkatin was a hot, dry world, but it had water vapor and convection thunderstorms, and it would make a home for another billion humans in another generation or so.

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