034- A Shipment of Mute Fate -Harry Bartell

Did you have too many Easter eggs today? Dreaming about that vacation you can't take yet. Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape! You are groping your way slowly through the dark hold of a ship at sea, moving carefully, step by step, searching intently for something you dread to find

because you know that this ship carries a cargo of Damn! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure! Tonight, at your request, we bring back one of our most popular escape stories.

We escape to a harborfront in Venezuela and a grim voyage which started from there, as told by Martin Storm in his gripping tale, a shipment of mute fate. I stopped on the larf at Lequara, and looked up the gangplank toward the liner Chiang-K, standing there quietly at her moorings.

They was warm under a bright, tropic sun, a harbor beyond the ship laid drowsy and silent. At all at once in the midst of those peaceful surroundings, a cold chill grip me, and I shivered with sudden dread.

Dread of the thing I was doing was about to do. Too much had happened to turn back now. I'd gone too far to stop. I set the box down on the edge of the wharf, placed it carefully so as to be in plain sight, and within gunshot of the captain's bridge.

I knew what I was going to do, but I couldn't forget that a certain pair of BD-I's were watching every move I made. Eyes had never blinked and never closed, just watched and waited. I turned and started up the gangplunk.