A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, October 1950 — page 106: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- RACKETEERS IN THE SKY 103 planetary engineers installed gravity equipment and geodesic drive. After Dr. Bull had pulled sufficient strings to insure the continued indepen- dence of Taurus, they had steered it into a new orbit, as Earth's inner moon. Now the naked stone was clothed with lawns and groves and gardens. Taurus glittered with expensive modernistic hospitals, clin- ics, hotels, casinos. Dr. Bull was always coining new descriptive slogans, for it. Jewel of Space. Hub of Fun. Wonder- moon. To the relief of the handsome nurse, he touched a golden button on the wall of It was then that the bad news arrived, brought by a gaunt gray man in the silver uniform of the Planeteers—so Dr. Bull called the two hundred men who formed the military and police force of his private planet. General Berg burst furiously through the crystal door at the end of the pool, shouting: “‘Oh, doctor!” Dr. Bull lifted his pink round head out the water. His smooth face made an an- noyed little frown against the Sun—which drove hard even through the Ailter-gases in the artificial atmosphere. | “Berg,” he protested, “I was not to be Pompous, round and rosy-faced, Dr. Bull was the King of Quacks —a chiseling faker who had built a patent-medi- cine racket into a cosmic swindle—until death tapped him on the shoulder and he had a whole life to pay for. the pool, to shut off the telecast receiver. After a few thousand repetitions, even the most effective spiel loses novelty. Float- ing, with his eyes closed, Dr. Bull sighed contentedly. Softly, he murmured three words: “Imagination. Audacity. Victory.” He was thinking back to the very be- vinning of his career—when he was just a six-dollar-a-week soda jerker, in a dusty small-town drug store, back on Earth, studying a mail-order course in dramatics, propped out of the view of his patrons behind the counter. Dramatics, he had de- cided, was more imporfant than pharma- ceutics. Imagination. Audacity. Victory. Those three words, he was thinking, were the key to his success. Maybe he could work them into the telecast. They had earned him just about everything that any man could want. disturbed. I left explicit instructions.” General Berg teetered on the ruby brink, desperately fought for his balance. “A ship—”’ he gasped. “A ship com- ing !”’ Taurus boasted a modern space-port, with docks ample to accommodate the largest interplanetary liners. Vessels ar- rived every day. They brought the mil- lions of illiterately addressed orders for bottles of Taurium, the thousands of pas- sengers that ranged from honeymooners to tottering oldsters seeking new youth through Dr. Bull’s reactivation treatment. “A ship,”’ said Dr. Bull. “Another mil- lion dollars !”’ General Berg recovered balance and breath. “‘A warship, sir,”” he amended stiffly. “It’s a patrol cruiser, proceeding from the direction of Appenine Base. It is showing no lights, and refuses to ack- nowledge the signals from our forts. It (C(O) nn) (C 6)(0)©) <S (C(O)