Project Gutenberg's The Giants From Outer Space, by Geoff St. Reynard

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Title: The Giants From Outer Space

Author: Geoff St. Reynard

Release Date: May 23, 2010 [EBook #32485]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 organi