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_Glamorous Lyn Venable of Dallas, Texas, makes a first appearance in
these pages (but by no means her first appearance in this field),
with this sensitive story of a young man who needn't have run. A
contributor to William Nolan's (OF TIME AND TEXAS, November, 1956,
Fantastic Universe) famous _Ray Bradbury Review_, Miss Venable
wants, very very much, to be a part, albeit small, of the comeback
of science fiction that is seen today, as she wrote us recently._
grove
of
the
unborn
_by ... LYN VENABLE_
Bheel still stood on the patio, transfixed with horror.
He heard the terrified cry "Dheb Tyn-Dall"--and then the
vigilant Guardians got him....
Tyndall heard the rockets begin to roar, and it seemed as though the
very blood in his veins pulsated with the surging of those mighty jets.
Going? They couldn't be going. Not yet. Not without him! And he heard
the roaring rise to a mighty crescendo, and he felt the trembling of the
ground beneath the room in which he lay, and then the great sound grew
less, and grew dim, and finally dissipated in a thin hum that dwindled
finally into silence. They were gone.
* * * * *
Tyndall threw himself face down on his couch, the feel of the slick,
strange fabric cold and unfriendly against his face. He lay there for a
long time, not moving. Tyndall's thoughts during those hours were of
very fundamental things, that beneath him, beneath the structure of the
building in which he was confined, lay a world that was not Earth,
circling a sun that was not Sol, and that the ship had gone and would
never come back. He was alone, abandoned. He thought of the ship, a
silver streak now in the implacable blackness of space, threading its
way homeward through the stars to Sol, to Earth. The utter desolation
which swept over him at the impact of his aloneness was more than he
could endure, and he forced himself to think of something else.
Why was he here then? John Tyndall, 3rd Engineer of the starship
_Polaris_. It had been such a routine trip, ferrying a group of
zoologists and biologists around the galaxy looking for unclassified
life-supporting planets. They had found such a world circling an obscure
sun half way across the galaxy. An ideal world for research expedition,
teeming with life, the scientists were delighted. In a few short months
they discovered and cataloged over a thousand varieties of flora and
fauna peculiar to this planet, called Arrill, after the native name
which sounded something like Ahhrhell. Yes, there were natives,
humanoid, civilized and gracious. They had seemed to welcome the
strangers, as a matter of fact they had seemed to expect them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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