Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 298: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BEHIND THE BLACK NEBULA L. Ron Hubbard THE LANDING prison ship hovered a space above the field as though arrested by the titanic battle in progress below, but In reality only waiting for the assembly of a securing crew. Hie Crystal Mines, beyond the mystery of the Black Nebula and in a world unlike anything anywhere in space outside, rippled in the waves of heat and shuddered under the rapid impact of fast-firing arc cannon. A desolate and grim ‘ outpost, the last despair of convicts for seventy-five years, the latest hope of a fuel-starved empire of space, racked continually by attack. The Crystal Mines, where disgraced officers came to battle, through their last days against forces which had as yet defied both analysis and weapon. Heartbreak and misery and war beneath a roof of steel and upon strangely quivering ground, amid vapors and gasses which put commas and then periods to the lives of the luckless criminals sent here as a ‘ “ punishment transcending in violence even slow execution. Gedso lon Brown stood at the port in awed silence, caught by the unleashed fury in the scene below and forgetting even the danger and mystery of their course into this place. For here below had come to being things more CORniclooo SS CO