The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pet Farm, by Roger Dee

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Title: Pet Farm

Author: Roger Dee

Illustrator: Dick Francis

Release Date: May 12, 2010 [EBook #32344]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Pet Farm

By ROGER DEE

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction
February 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _The next worst thing to hell is being shanghaied into the
Paradise of an alien planet!_]

They had fled almost to the sheer ambient face of the crater wall when
the Falakian girl touched Farrell's arm and pointed back through the
scented, pearly mists.

"Someone," she said. Her voice stumbled over the almost forgotten Terran
word, but its sound was music.

"No matter," Farrell answered. "They're too late now."

He pushed on, happily certain in his warm euphoric glow of mounting
expectancy that what he had done to the ship made him--and his new-found
paradise with him--secure.

He had almost forgotten who _they_ were; the pale half-memories that
drifted through his mind touched his consciousness lightly and without
urgency, arousing neither alarm nor interest.

The dusk grew steadily deeper, but the dimming of vision did not matter.

Nothing mattered but the fulfillment to come.

Far above him, the lacy network of bridging, at one time so baffling,
arched and vanished in airy grace into the colored mists. To right and
left, other arms of the aerial maze reached out, throwing vague
traceries from cliff to cliff across the valley floor. Behind him on the
plain he could hear the eternally young people playing about their
little blue lake, flitting like gay shadows through the tamarisks and
calling to each other in clear elfin voices while they frolicked after
the fluttering swarms of great, bright-hued moths.

The crater wall h