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. copyrighton this publication was renewed.]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
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'tbe seeing things that aren't there?"
"Not in a million years."
"Then there's no water, no air, no gravity worth mentioning, andstill—"
"That's right. There's life on that silly-looking little apple. There'ssomebody sitting on it!"
In the ninetieth star system to be explored by the insatiably curiousmen of Earth, there were seven planets. Between the fourth and fifthfrom the star there was a belt of asteroids: some three or four thousandtiny planetary bodies traveling in vast ellipses around the star. At onetime they had probably constituted a single planet, but someunimaginable explosion far back in time had scattered the great ballbroadcast, and the largest of the resulting planetoids was now no morethan 440 miles across. In the gargantuan belt of them, many were nobigger 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 itand let his cartographer map it, his organicus officer check it fo