All The Time In The World (ePub)

The boy was tall and handsome and ... red. ...This boy, whom he had always thought of as his son.



Excerpt



Stephan Wentworth had not had such a good laugh for as long as he could remember. He had spent twenty arduous, triumphant years Nereid, fifteenth planet of the star Alpha Centauri. Some star-maps actually listed the little planet as Wentworths Planet because of huge land grants given him by the natives. The people of Nereid, though extremely generous in their traits, were naturally slothful. Stephan Wentworth had driven them to their tasks. He had hounded the migrant earthmen, equally lazy. Men hated him for accumulating such wealth and prestige on another planet - but this! Doc Lezen was a card all right. It was the tallest tale he'd heard in many a Nereidan moon.



Coming naked from the germicidal mist-shower that ended the medical examination, Stephan Wentworth stood in a jet of warm drying air. He was a large man, big boned and heavy, but even at fifty-two this red-haired giant did not display the usual flabbiness of that age. He reached in the locker for his clothing, consisting of the silvery metaline tunic, breeches of planetary white, soft gravity slippers with cushion soles. Then the humor of it overcame him. He staggered around laughing, one foot in the breeches, the other out. An incredulous look transformed the usual severity of his strong face, making him appear younger than he actually was. Exertion in this thin rarefied air sent pain stabbing into his pleural regions, made him gasp. Remembering his oxytank, the one he usually wore at all times, he saw it on a table.



After a puzzled moment, Dr. Frank Lezen joined in the merriment. Old Frank was not huge like Stephan Wentworth. He was sixty-four. There would be a time, not long hence, when he would hang up his stethoscope forever and retire to one of the pleasure planets. Laughter racked and threatened to injure his frail body in its loose garb of sanitary white plasticloth. His thin face was crowned by tufts of white hair like quotation marks, underlined by a short but imposing beard. Now the face became a writhing morass of wrinkles as his mouth gaped open and his laughter emerged as a dry cackling.



"Sent a fleet of fifty ships to space yesterday!" Stephan Wentworth had bragged. "Everyone loaded to the hilt with cargo. We loaded them in three days and two nights and four hours and five minutes. That's a record, let me tell you, even for Stephan Wentworth." No doubt of his physical fitness bothered him. He could hardly remember the day he'd been sick.