Buck Rogers 1 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

Come along
on the Greatest of All Adventures!
Join
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century! . . .

As he plunges into the cosmos on Earth’s last deep-space probe . . .

As he succumbs to an assault of tremendously cold gases . . .

As he is miraculously revived after a five-hundred year “frozen death” aboard a Draconian Empire ship—only to become the plaything of the alluring Princess Ardala and a pawn in the treacherous game of Kane, menacing commander of the Draconian fleet . . .

As he returns to Earth a stranger, feared, suspected, driven out into the lawless wastes of Anarchia—with only a devoted android and a computerized drone . . . to help him save his life—and his planet—from dread tyranny.

A 25th CENTURY DOGFIGHT

Wilma Deering’s Starfighter went into its automatically programmed maneuvers, rolling across the sky. The marauder craft followed, matching move for move.

Buck watched in shock, flicked on his radio, shouted at Wilma, “Take it down, Colonel! Straight down! Don’t roll! Throw on your space-flaps!”

“I can’t!” Wilma cried in response. “It’s against all the principles of modern space combat!”

And the sky began to explode all around her.

Buck’s ship flashed across the sky, streaking to a point above the maneuvering pair. Buck dived, swung through a difficult Immelmann, streaked toward the marauder from nine o’clock, and pressed his firing stud once, twice.

The marauder blossomed into flame. For once Buck was able to grin . . . as was the pilot of the rescued Starfighter, Colonel Wilma Deering!

Buck pulled his Starfighter alongside Wilma’s, tossed her an old-fashioned thumbs-up salute, then streaked away, leaving the colonel to reexamine her notions of military doctrine—and her feelings about Captain Wilham “Buck” Rogers!

Published by
Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
New York, New York 10017

This work is based on the teleplay by Glen A. Larson
and Leslie Stevens

Copyright © 1978 by Robert C. Dille

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN: 0-440-10843-8

Printed in the United States of America
First printing—November 1978

B U C K   R O G E R S
IN THE 25
^TH
CENTURY

P R O L O G U E:  1 9 8 7

The spaceship, standing tall and proud in the early morning sunlight at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was the most advanced production of Free World technology. Its lines were clean. Its command module was functional, efficient, manufactured to the micromillimeter by the most brilliant engineers, the most expensive machinery, and with the most sophisticated techniques that mankind had ever conceived.

Its engines were a dream, designed for maximum power efficiency, control, economy, smoothness of operation, and versatility of performance.

The engineers had said it was impossible to design engines that would meet all those criteria. The comptrollers had said it was far too expensive. The politicians had said, “Our priorities are all wrong! We need to rebuild the cities, feed starving nations, clean up the air and the oceans, the rivers and the land.”

The politicians were then invited to attend secret high-level briefings. Limousines that burned black gold at the rate of five miles to the gallon, black gold that cost almost four dollars a gallon in 1987, carried them through back streets past hushed onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House. A presidential aide greeted them under the front portico and guided them to an executive conference room.

The presidential aide disappeared shortly after the politicians arrived. He returned, now, carrying briefing materials that he distributed to the senators. Each senator received a packet. Each packet had a warning notice rubber-stamped on its cover in glaring incandescent red:

These materials are classified maximum security. They may not be taken with you. The information they contain may not be quoted, cited, or referred to by you in public or in private, in any medium or manner, directly or indirectly, under maximum legal penalty.

The senators were given a few minutes to familiarize themselves with the contents of the briefing packets. No discussion was permitted.

The presidential aide disappeared still again and then returned in advance of the President himself.

The President was neatly dressed, freshly shaved, smiling, optimistic. He was a convincing actor—but senators are good actors, too. They saw through his bright exterior.

The President made an opening statement. The senators responded with questions. What they had learned at State, at the Pentagon, at Intelligence, here at the White House—all pointed in one direction. The President did not need to plead, did not need to exert any of the famous charm—or the infamous pressure-tactics that had brought him to his elevated position.

The President told the senators the bald truth, and they went back to the Senate and voted money.

NASA and all of NASA’s contractors then worked feverishly for months, around the clock.

And now the spaceship stood glittering in the morning sunlight. Inland, rows of palmettos and calamander trees hissed softly in a light zephyr. Out to sea, over the Atlantic, gulls swooped and hovered in the clear, salt-tanged air. There were no fishing boats, no rich men’s yachts, no sight-seeing craft in the takeoff lane.

Reaction materials, engine exhausts, staging particles might drop there. Anyone caught beneath a rocket as it thundered into the sky was in dire peril of catching a thousand-ton cylinder of metals and plastics and more exotic materials in his startled little lap.

Inside the spaceship, one man worked alone through the checklist of switches and controls, safety measures, computer programs, instrument readouts, telemetering connections, knobs, dials, indicators. His earphones brought him a constant stream of instructions and questions and comments from Mission Control. Into a tiny microphone he almost whispered the readings and responses that Mission Control expected.

Hundreds of tiny probes picked up his skin temperature, blood pressure, respiration rate, eyeball motion, heart action, muscle tension, nerve conditions, even his brain waves. Inside the Mission Control tower these and scores more were displayed on video tubes that glowed with an eerie light while automatic pens traced out a permanent record of the astronaut’s condition on long sheets of paper that rolled slowly past their tips—lines in red, green, blue, black, purple, crossing and re-crossing each other as they danced and jiggled across the endlessly unrolling plain of pale turquoise squares.

High over the Atlantic a complex game of hide-and-seek was taking place. American space satellites were linked into the spaceship-Mission Control net, ready to relay telemetered information, take observations, provide data. Simultaneously, foreign hunter-killer satellites sought out the American instrumentation and communication satellites, invisible laser beams flashing when one came into range; a destroyed satellite would not plummet, meteorlike, to Earth. It would remain in orbit, calmly circling the Earth for years or even centuries until its path slowly decayed and it burned up in the thicker air closer to the surface. But meanwhile, it would be dead.

At the same time, foreign spy-satellites tried electronically to tap into the communication between the astronaut in his ship and the hundreds of engineers and flight controllers who sat at their consoles reading
their
instruments and dials, switching
their
toggles and knobs, checking off
their
logbooks . . . and listening to the near-whispered words of the pilot in the spaceship, whispering back answers to his questions, checking and double- and triple-checking every variable in the procedure.

There was one funny thing about it all.

The astronaut—blue-eyed, short-haired, muscled with the lithe strength of a trained gymnast rather than the bulging brute power of a weight-lifter—sometimes hummed a little tune under his breath. It was an old tune. It was the tune of a song written before the astronaut’s father was ever born, written when his grandfather was a little boy. It was a funny, infectious tune, and it had words to it that occasionally broke through the humming, to the startlement of NASA flight controllers and, we can be certain, to the absolute bafflement of anybody sitting on another continent, sifting through the static and electronic background noise of a spy satellite orbiting over Cape Canaveral, Florida and eavesdropping on the exchanges between the astronaut and his flight controllers.

He was singing, now and then, a funny little song about a wonderful town, a toddling town, a town where a man even danced with his wife. Chicago, that was the town. Chicago.