THE SOUL EATERS
By WILLIAM CONOVER
Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance
to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose
ships were the scourge of the Void. But his
luck had run its course, and now he was
marooned on a rogue planet—fighting to save
himself from a menace weapons could not kill.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"And so, my dear," Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, "I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets—or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by."
Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder—limpid as a child's.
The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua, were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude—the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.
Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.
A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.