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The Giants From Outer Space
By Geoff St. Reynard
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination May 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright
on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: Grim terror lurked in the void many light years from Earth.
But Pinkham and his men were unaware of it--until suddenly they
discovered--The Giants From Outer Space]
CHAPTER I
"Okay, make another check on the reading."
"I've made four checks already--"
"Damn it, make another!"
"It's no use, Pink. The life-scanner's never wrong."
"No possibility of a monkey wrench dropped into its innards? It couldn't
be seeing things that aren't there?"
"Not in a million years."
"Then there's no water, no air, no gravity worth mentioning, and
still--"
"That's right. There's life on that silly-looking little apple. _There's
somebody sitting on it!_"
In the ninetieth star system to be explored by the insatiably curious
men of Earth, there were seven planets. Between the fourth and fifth
from the star there was a belt of asteroids: some three or four thousand
tiny planetary bodies traveling in vast ellipses around the star. At one
time they had probably constituted a single planet, but some
unimaginable explosion far back in time had scattered the great ball
broadcast, and the largest of the resulting planetoids was now no more
than 440 miles across. In the gargantuan belt of them, many were no
bigger in diameter than the spaceship _Elephant's Child_ herself.
When the instruments of the ship detected this belt of asteroids,
Captain Pinkham turned aside as a matter of course, to cruise through it
and let his cartographer map it, his organicus officer check it for
signs of life, and all his other crewmen turn their inquisitive eyes and
machines upon it. It was the seventh asteroid belt to be discovered by
man, if you included the one between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars,
back home, incredible light-years behind....
No life had ever been discovered on an asteroid, except for the
vegetable-animal space-eating bacteria on Pallas. No life--
Until now.
* * * * *
Captain Pinkham headed for the tiny bit of planet, let his ship's
screens pick it up and relay its presence to the automatic recoil
engines, which slammed the _Elephant's Child_ to a stop about twelve
feet away from the knobbly slate-gray surface. The energy testers,
having come into play simultaneously with the screens, at once flashed
the green "Not Radioactive" sign; a fairly useless gesture, since a
positive reaction would have turned the ship away at an angle before it
entered the danger zone.
The senior officer; said, "Jerry, let's take a look at that critter you
think is perched on this thing."
The organicus officer grinned with one corner of his mouth. He pulled
down a platinum lever, and a thirty-inch screen above his control board
sprang to life. The black of space showed the bumpy planetoid like a
ball of cold lava, and seated in the center of the screen, a man in a
spacesuit.
Captain Pinkham licked his lips. "Okay," he said, "I owe you a shot of
rye. You were right." Then he blinked his gray eyes. "My God!" he
roared. "What's a human being doing out here in System Ninety?"
The outburst, he felt, was quite justified; in fact, he might have gone
stark raving crazy with justification. There seemed no possibility that
his space armada could have been preceded to this star system by another
from Earth. The ancient Martians might have made it this far, but their
spacesuits were nothing like those of Terra. So he and Jerry were now
staring at a hopeless absurdity. It couldn't be there.
Pinkham leaned sideways and bellowed into the intercom. "Get in here!
Everybody! On the double!"
The crew came running, from the engine rooms, the astrogatium and
astrolab, from the sleeping quarters and the mess hall. The ship was
gigantic; it took twenty minutes, for the ship's complement to assemble
in the captain's control hall. There were fifty-seven men, eighteen
officers. They stood in casual formation and gaped at the life-scanner's
screen.
The spacesuited figure had not moved.
Captain Pinkham said, "One question. Which of you gadget-happy jokers
gimmicked up the scanner on us? Who did this?"
Nobody said anything. Only one man smiled: Lieutenant Joe Silver, a very
bright, very ambitious big cub who was on his second extragalactic
expedition and obviously had visions of earning his captain's bronze
comets within the year. Joe was a rather unpleasant young piece of beef,
thought Pink; but he wouldn't pull practical jokes. He was too bloody
serious. If he smiled, it was probably because he was enjoying the
Captain's evident bewilderment.
"Then it isn't a joke," said Pinkham. "Three of you outside repairmen
get into your suits and bring _that_ in." He gestured at the silent
figure on the motionless little world of the scanner. "Jerry says it's
alive. Handle with care." He waved them his dismissal.
Some twenty minutes later he watched the screen as the three crewmen
descended to the surface of the planetoid, pried loose the double anchor
which the unknown Earthman had sunk into the ball's crust to hold him
steady on the almost-gravityless world, lifted the bulky figure and
leaped upward, like thick but weightless panthers carrying their prey,
into the open air-lock.
The spacesuited stranger had not moved in the slightest.
Yet the scanner, which was never wrong, said that within the armor of
the suit was life.
Pinkham sat staring at the blanked-out screen, and a queer chill began
to crawl up his neck. An old slang phrase came to his mind, and wouldn't
leave.
How come? How come? _How come?_