The Giants From Outer Space

“Okay, make another check on the reading.” 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 “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.