Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net 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."