Astounding Science Fiction, February 1952 (British Edition) — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

COURTESY By CLIFFORD D. SIMAK When the mighty Earthmen arrive in their ships of space, courtesy and proper humility on the part of the natives ts expected. But some native inhabitants are too small to be impressed— rE\HE serum was no good. The labels Z. told the story. Dr. James H. Morgan took his glasses off and wiped them carefully, cold terror clutching at his*innards. He put the spec- tacles back on, probing at them with a thick, blunt finger to settle them into cor- rect position. Then he took another look. He had been right the first time. The date on the serum consignment was a good ten years too old. He wheeled slowly, lumbered a few ponderous steps to the tent flap and stood there, squat body framed in the triangular entrance, pudgy hands gripping the canvas on either side. Outside the fantastic lichen moors stretched to gray and bleak horizons. The setting sun was a dull red glow in the west and to the east, the doctor knew, night already was beginning to close in, with that veil of purplish light that seemed to fall like a curtain upon the land and billow rapidly across it. A chill wind blew out of the east, already touched with the frigidity of night, and twitched the canvas beneath the doctor’s fingers. “Ah, yes,” said Dr. Morgan, “the merry moors of Landro.” A lonely place, he told himself. Not lonely only in its barrenness nor in its alien wildness, but with an ingrained lone- liness that could drive a man mad if he were left alone with it. Like a great cemetery, he thought, an empty place of dead. And yet without the cemeterys close association, without the tenderness and the inevitability of a ceme- tery. For a cemetery held in sacred trust the husks of those who once had lived and this place was an emptiness that held no memory at all. But not for long, said Dr. Morgan. Not for long now. He stood looking at the barren slope that rose above the camp and he decided that it would make an eminently satisfactory cemetery. 23 All places looked alike. That was the trouble. You couldn’t tell one place from another. There were no trees and there were no bushes, just a fuzzy-looking scrub that — grew here and there, clothing the naked. land in splotches, like the ragged coat that a beggar wears. Benny Falkner stopped on the path as it topped the rise and stood rigid with the fear that was mounting in him. Fear of the coming night and of its bitter cold, fear of the silent hills and the shadowed swales, and the more distant and yet more terrible fear of the little natives that might this very moment be skulking on the hillside. He put up his arm and wiped the sweat off his brow with his tattered sleeve. He shouldn’t have been sweating, he told him- self, for it was chilly now and getting colder by the minute. In another hour or two it would be cold enough to freeze a man un- protected in the open. He fought down the terror that choked his throat and set his teeth a-chatter and for an instant stood stock-still to convince himself he was not panic-stricken. He had been going east and that meant he must go west to reach the camp again. Although the catch was that he couldn’t be absolutely sure he had been going east ail the time—he might have trended north a little or even wandered south. But the devia- tion couldn’t have been enough, he was sure, to throw him so far off that he could not spot the camp by returning straight into the west. Sometime soon he should sight the smoke of the Earthmen’s camp. Any ridge, the next ridge, each succeeding hummock in the winding trail, he had assured himself, would bring him upon the camp itself. He would reach higher ground and there the camp would be, spread out in front of him, with the semicircle of white canvas gleaming in — the fading light and the thin trail of smoke rising from the larger cook tent where Bat Ears Brady would be bellowing one of his obscene songs. | But that had been an hour ago when the Eomichbooks.co