United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It was full dark when Konkrook came in view beyond the East Konk Mountains, a lurid smear on the underside of the clouds, and at Gongonk Island and at the Company farms to the south, a couple of bunches of searchlights were fingering about in the sky. When von Schlichten turned on the outside sound-pickup, he could hear the distant tom-tomming of heavy guns, and the crash of shells and bombs.

Many of them were placed around lovely fountains, or urns of flowers. But I want to tell of one very beautiful and costly kind of ornament that is made from some conch-shells, pronounced "konk." Romans and Greeks, but especially the Greeks, used to cut "cameos" from the onyx-stone.

He had the Aldebaran sent north along the crest of the mountain-range between the Hoork and Konk river-valleys, where she could cover both with her own radar and other detection-devices and exchange information with the Sky-Spy, and the Gaucho sent in what looked like the right course to intercept the Boer-class freighter from Keegark.

"You know the line Rakkeed's been taking, of course," Colonel Cheng-Li put in. "He as much as says that Niflheim's our home, and that the farms where we raise food, here, and those evergreen plantings on Konk Isthmus and between here and Grank are the beginning of an attempt to drive all native life from this planet and make it over for ourselves."

"Welcome, Gurgurk," Harrington gibbered through his false palate. "The Company is honored by this visit." "I come in the name of my royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all the lands of the Konk Isthmus," Gurgurk squeaked and clicked.

Old Missus would cry an' she was good to us but dey had no money. "'Fo de war Marse Murry would wake all de niggers by blowin' a big 'konk' an' den when dinner time would come Old Missus would blow de 'konk' an' call dem to dinner. I got so I could blow dat 'konk' fer Old Missus but oh! it tuk my wind. "Marse Murry would 'low me to drive his team when he would go to market.

And hush! hark!" he exclaimed, suddenly cutting short his remark, as the well-known, solemn, and quickly-repeated konk! konk! of wild geese, on their passage, greeted their ears.

The Jan Smuts vanished in a blaze of light that blinded everybody in the room; when they could see again, after some thirty seconds, the screen was dark. In the direct-vision screen from the Sky-Spy, the whole countryside of the Konk Valley, five hundred miles north of Konkrook, was lighted. The heat and radiation detectors were going insane.

Then the Gaucho reported radar-contact with the Keegarkan ship, which had begun to turn in a hairpin-shaped course and was coming south down the Konk Valley. After that, the Gaucho began reporting directly, and her topside identification-light went out. "... doused our lights; we're down in the valley, altitude about a thousand feet.

Ahead, the city of Konkrook sprawled along the delta of the Konk river and extended itself inland. The river was dry, now. Except in Spring, when it was a red-brown torrent, it never ran more than a trickle, and not at all this late in the Northern Summer. The aircar lost altitude, and the hot-jet stopped firing.