cus 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."

The organicus officer grinned with one corner of his mouth. He pulled
down a platinum lever, and a thirty-inch screen above his control board
sprang to life. The black of space showed the bumpy planetoid like a
ball of cold lava, and seated in the center of the screen, a man in a
spacesuit.

Captain Pinkham licked his lips. "Okay," he said, "I owe you a shot of
rye. You were right." Then he blinked his gray eyes. "My God!" he
roared. "What's a human being doing out here in System Ninety?"

The outburst, he felt, was quite justified; in fact, he might have gone
stark raving crazy with justification. There seemed no possibility that
his space armada could have been preceded to this star system by another
from Earth. The ancient Martians might have made it this far, but their
spacesuits were nothing like those of Terra. So he and Jerry were now
staring at a hopeless absurdity. It couldn't be there.

Pinkham leaned sideways and bellowed into the intercom. "Get in here!
Everybody! On the double!"

The crew came running, from the engine rooms, the astrogatium and
astrolab, from the sleeping quarters and the mess hall. The ship was
gigantic; it took twenty minutes, for the ship's complement to assemble
in the captain's control hall. There were fifty-seven men, eighteen
officers. They stood in casual formation and gaped at the life-scanner's
screen.

The space