The Affairs Of The Brains

CHAPTER I

_Off to the Rendezvous_



[Illustration: Hawk Carse himself goes to keep Judd the Kite's
rendezvous with the sinister genius Ku Sui.]

Though it is seldom nowadays that Earthmen hear mention of Hawk Carse,
there are still places in the universe where his name retains all its
old magic. These are the lonely outposts of the farthest planets, and
here when the outlanders gather to yarn the idle hours away their tales
conjure up from the past that raw, lusty period before the patrol-ships
came, and the slender adventurer, gray-eyed and with queer bangs of hair
obscuring his forehead, whose steely will, phenomenal ray-gun draw and
reckless space-ship maneuverings combined to make him the period's most
colorful figure. These qualities of his live again in the outlanders'
reminiscences and also of course his score of blood-feuds and the one
great feud that shook whole worlds in its final terrible settling--the
feud of Hawk Carse and Dr. Ku Sui.

Again and again the paths of the adventurer and the sinister, brilliant
Eurasian crossed, and each crossing makes a rich tale. Time after time
Ku Sui, through his several bands of space-pirates, his individual
agents and his ambitious web of power insidiously weaving over the
universe, whipped his tentacles after the Hawk, and always the tentacles
coiled back, repulsed and bloody. An almost typical episode is in the
affair which followed what has been called the Exploit of the Hawk and
the Kite.

It will be remembered--as related in "Hawk Carse"[1]--that Dr. Ku laid a
most ingenious trap for Carse on the latter's ranch on Iapetus, eighth
satellite of Saturn. Judd the Kite, pirate and scavenger, was the
Eurasian's tool in this plot, which started with a raid on the ranch.
The fracas which followed the Hawk's escape from the trap was bloody and
grim enough, and resulted in the erasure of Judd and all his men save
one; but the important thing to the following affair was that Judd's
ship, the Scorpion, fell into Carse's hands with one prisoner and the
ship's log, containing the space coordinates for a prearranged
assignation of Judd with Ku Sui.