The Project Gutenberg EBook of Daughters of Doom, by Herbert B. Livingston

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Title: Daughters of Doom

Author: Herbert B. Livingston

Illustrator: Bill Terry

Release Date: April 18, 2008 [EBook #25094]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DAUGHTERS

OF DOOM

By H. B. HICKEY

Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was
there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .

Beyond Ventura B there was no life; there was nothing but one worn out sun
after another, each with its retinue of cold planets and its trail of dark
asteroids. At least that was what the books showed, and the books had been
written by men who knew their business. Yet, despite the books and the men
who had written them, Ben Sessions went past Ventura B, deliberately and
all alone and knowing that the odds were against his returning alive.

He went because of a file clerk's error. More correctly, he went as the
final result of a chain of events which had begun with the clerk's mistake.

The clerk's name was Gilbert Wayne and he worked at the Las Vegas
Interplanetary Port. It was Wayne's job to put through the orders for
routine overhaul of interplanetary rockets. Usually Wayne was quite
efficient, but even efficient men have bad days, and on one of those days
Wayne had removed from the active list the name of Astra instead of its
sister ship, the Storan.

The very next morning the Astra had been turned over to Maintenance.
Maintenance asked no questions. It was that department's job to take the
ship apart, fix what needed fixing, and put it. Ten minutes later Jacobs
saw Armando Gomez was the mechanic detailed to check the rocket tubes.

Gomez, who always got that job because he was small and slender, dutifully
dropped his instruments into his overall pockets and crawled into the left
firing tube. Half an hour later he stuck his head out of the tube and
yelled to