Showing results by narrator "Scott Miller" in All Categories

After a friendly encounter with the Yapudttka Ute, their journey would take them into the middle of a fight between the Mouache Ute and an expedition of gold-hungry Spaniards. The prospectors traveled across the southern tier of the land known as New Spain in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola—the same cities of gold once sought by Coronado—now thought to be in the headwaters of a river in the Sawatch mountains of the Rockies. When the leader of the Spaniards tries to enslave the band of Utes to dig for gold, it starts a bloody battle.

When you are only about 90 degrees from absolute zero, it is not hot, despite the fact that the sun is shining down on you 24 hours a day. The answer to this riddle is that you are on Uranus, in the arctic circle, where the sun is a bright star almost directly overhead. And what are you doing on Uranus? You need the money. Nils Borgmann, however, was sweating. And the reason was that the heating unit on his space suit, like the heating units on almost all space suits, was not functioning properly.

Read by the author. Mining the best and brightest revelations from FranklinCovey’s global podcast, On Leadership with Scott Miller, Scott personally introduces you to 30 Master Mentors, featuring the single most transformative insight from each of them. Depending on where you are in your...

Midstadt used to be a monarchy. Until it wasn’t. Now, 100 years after the blood of the last king flowed from the steps of Parliament Square, another rotting empire has the jewel of the Ragged Sea in its sights. It means to bring them into its fold, to swallow up the fledgling republic before the fires of its industries can sweep across the world. While anarchists wage battle with monarchists beneath the streets, and war brews in the South, Sergeant James Delwar and the officers of the Meridian Watch begin an investigation that will take them to the heights of the old aristocracy.

Greg was sure the kids had no right being in control of a planet; after all what had they learned about life? Still, what had he learned? The old ship wheezed and clattered into the landing slot. Greg was an expert pilot, but skill was no substitute for outdated equipment. He unstrapped the safety webbing and eased himself out of the cabin, cluttered with its worn and scarred electronic gadgetry. With the handcrank, he opened the airlock. Rusting metal screamed as the panel slid back into the hull.

Henig was sent to obtain a soil sample of the planet. It was a routine assignment, but not necessarily the only method for discovering an—Export Commodity. Three of the hairless bipeds stood in front of the frame building talking. Concealed by the brush beyond the road, Henig studied them carefully. The pale, white-skinned animals had a culture of sorts—their language, their buildings, their wheeled vehicles testified to that—but an animal society was very different from the rational civilization Henig knew.

Gentle Marene was next when the black space cruiser called for its youth-levy. If only Zurk would spark to life - Zurk, this huge, part-human war machine of tubular steel muscles and blank, mechanical mind. There was both agony and defeat etched deeply into Guyard's lean face as he stood there in the center of the hidden attic laboratory. His fists were clinched tightly at his sides and his hollow eyes were staring tensely and with supplication at the steel monstrosity before him. "Zurk, you must save her!" he pleaded. "You must save Marene!" Zurk, the man of steel, made no move.

The base diner was hot and stuffy that night as Scotty Johnson sat with Mitch and Jack and the other boys, sipping his last cup of coffee before Zero Hour rolled around. Mitch and Jack had succeeded in sneaking him out of town before the reporters had guessed what was happening. Now, they sat in silence, sipping their coffee, glancing at him from time to time as though to make sure he were still there. It annoyed Scotty. This was the time to laugh, and joke, and bull away as if nothing was going to happen at all.

The bloody waters at the lake’s edge told of the destruction of the Kutenai village. Dead bodies were strewn about, smoke curled from burning lodges, and the war cries of screaming Blackfoot warriors followed the war party from the scene of death and destruction. It started as a rivalry between two war leaders of the Piikani Blackfoot. Friends since their youth, they both wanted the same woman and were on a quest for honors and loot. Together with his battle-hardened friend, Black Buffalo, these two were determined to become the personification of vengeance.

It was supposed to be a cozy winter in their new cabin, but it started with a cantankerous grizzly wreaking havoc on everything. After a trading foray to visit the Salish, everything seemed to get turned upside down. They found themselves in contested territory with a band of young bucks from the Siksika band that sought to gain scalps and captives from their sworn enemies, the Salish. And that wasn’t enough to upset their peaceful plans, but when Gabe found out the Blackfoot had stolen the mares bred by his stallion and were carrying foals that belonged to him, it became personal.

They had rescued a young Nez Percé warrior from the warring Blackfoot and were bound on a journey to take him home to his people. The vast land of the Bitterroot Mountains, and the badlands that lay at their feet, held more obstacles than they expected. It was to prove to be a treacherous journey, fraught with natural disasters and conflicts with familiar foes. But when confronted with evil of another sort, an evil that sought to destroy their very own, it became kill or be killed, and blood would soon paint the mountains and the plains of the wilderness.

When the Salish war leader Spotted Eagle appeared in the clearing before their cabin, lifelong friends Gabe and Ezra weren’t sure what to think. This man had shown himself to be their friend, and now he invited them to join him and the village on a buffalo hunt. With winter just around the corner, it seemed the likely thing to do, but had they known what the journey would bring, they might have had second thoughts. Gabe and Ezra’s discovery of the massacre of the Paiute village and the three survivors was just the beginning of the fight against the warring Waiilatpus.

What started as a joyous reunion of friends, soon became one of the most challenging periods of their lives. Chosen as scouts for the Kuccuntikka village of the Shoshone for their trek to the grand encampment of the Shoshone, their encounter with the scouts from the Tukkutikka band would set them on a different course altogether.

After spending most of five years in the Rocky Mountains, Gabriel Stonecroft finds it necessary to return to civilization to settle some long-past accounts. He sets out from the headwaters of the Missouri River, with his only companion a wolf, navigating the wild river through the lands of the Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, and more. But an attack by a renegade French voyageur and his rebel Blackfoot companions is just one of the obstacles in his way.

Writing stories was hard work - unless Fred had a typewriter like "Reggie" that could write by itself! Nonsense? Fred agreed until he met the plagiarist from Rigel IV. I bought the typewriter in a pawn shop on Third Avenue. The pawn shop proprietor was a balding old man with a walrus mustache. "How much?" I asked him. "Five dollars," he said casually.

He stared with fascination at a heap of newspapers spread out on the corner stand. He could guess the purpose of these layers of white sheets covered with black or red symbols, but he could not yet interpret them, and he had no idea whether anyone had seen or reported his ship. It was almost certain that someone had observed a shooting star, but the chances were very much against any observation having been made of the star’s slow, dark drift to Earth.

Half of Jupiter's great disk and most of the other moons were below the horizon when the man stepped out of the plane and changed her life. As far as Carol Marsh was concerned, he was ordinary enough in appearance. And she wasn't ordinarily attracted to ordinary men. He was slightly over medium height, his features were not quite regular, and he had a deep tan over what had started out as a sunburn, so that she decided he had misjudged the strength of the sun on some planet with a thin atmosphere.

Homer was a shy Faderfield bachelor; his visitor was a beautiful Pleiades girl. At any rate, she was a girl, and Homer had a problem. The fly rod, the letter, and the small jar of paint were half of the problem Homer Hopkins had to solve. The other half rested in his complex mind. Fader's Fadeless Formulae had offered him a position, not a job, to take charge of its research department, at 10,000 a year, twice what he was paid at Faderfield Junior College to teach chemistry. All this was in the letter.

Silvia secretly planned to divorce George when they reached Arcturus. But a space journey can alter a careful plan - or hatch a worse one. The trouble started when the Arcturus Queen was four billion miles out of Earth, heading for the star after which it was named. It pulled clear of the solar system using conventional drive, then switched into subspace. A few minutes later, the ship shuddered perceptibly, and an authoritative voice came reassuringly from the public address system.

Frane Lewis enjoyed another sadistic shiver as he moved up the narrow passageway to the captain's control room. To his flared nostrils, the warm, moist air of the small space freighter was still heavy with the smell of death. A psychiatrist could have told him that this was a neural confusion of olfactory sensation with the perverted emotional excitement of murder. But no physician ever attended Frane's murders, except at inquests.