Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 10 — page 42: what you’re looking at

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

oie ye > iM Mie Ss > =~ Sete oe pnd . 7 LaF LieX re _tirely of spears. Six of them flew silently from the top of the bank and stuck quivering in the Bree’s deck; two more glanced from the protective shells of sailors and clattered about on the rafts before coming to rest. The sailors who had been hit leaped convulsively from pure reflex, and both landed yards away in the river. They swam back and clam- bered aboard without assistance, for all eyes were directed toward the source of the mysterious attack. Without orders the helmsman angled more sharply toward the center of the river. “I. wonder who sent those—and if they used a machine like the Flyer’s. There wasn’t the same noise.” Barlennan spoke half aloud, not caring whether he ‘were answered. Terblannen wrenched one of the spears out of the deck and examined its hardwood point; then experimentally, he threw it back at the receding shore. Since throwing was a completely new art to him, except for experiments such as he had made in getting objects to the top of the tank in the stone-rollers’ city, he threw it as a child throws a stick, and it went spinning end over end back to the woods. Barlennan’s question was partly answered; short as his crewman’s arms were, the weapon reached the bank easily. The invisible attackers at least didn’t need anything like Lackland’s gun if they were anything like ordinary people physi- cally. They might, of course, be giants such as they had met already; Barlennan suddenly realized that he had no idea of the physical strength of those beings, since none of his crew had become in- volved hand-to-hand with them in that fight. There seemed no way to tell what the present attackers were, and the cap- tain had no intention of finding out by direct examination. The Bree kept on downstream, while an account of the affair went winging up to Lackland on distant Toorey. It was a comfort, felt even by the sailors who could not understand his language, to be able to talk to this mysterious and power- ful being even though he was no longer with them. His answer in the present case was a little mysterious, even to Barlennan. - ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION “For a planet that should be dead and in cold storage, Mesklin can certainly keep a person hopping.” Nothing more came of the incident. For fully a hundred miles the forest continued while the fiver widened gradually. The Bree kept out in midstream for a time after her single encounter with the forest dwellers, but even that did not keep her completely out of trouble. Only a few days after the arrival of the spears, a small clearing was sighted on the left bank. His view point only a few inches off the surface prevented Barlennan from seeing as well as he would have liked, but there were certainly objects in that clear- ing worthy of examination. After some hesitation he ordered the ship a little closer to that bank. The objects looked a little like trees, but were shorter and thicker. Had he been a little higher he would have seen small openings in them just above ground level which might have been informative; Lackland, watching through one of the vision sets, compared the things at once to pictures he had seen of the huts of African natives, but he said nothing yet. Actually he was more interested in a number of other items lying partly in and partly out of the river in front of what he already assumed to be a village. They might have been logs or crocodiles, for they were not too clearly visible at this distance, but he rather suspected they were canoes. It would be interesting to see how Barlennan reacted to a boat so radically different from his own. It was quite a while, however, before anyone on the Bree realized that the “logs” were canoes or the other mysterious objects dwellings. For a time, in fact, Lackland feared that they would drift on downstream without ever finding out; their recent experience had made Bar- lennan very cautious indeed. However, there were others besides Lackland who did not want the ship to drift by without stopping, and as she approached the point on her course opposite the village a red-and-black flood of bodies poured over the bank and proved that the Earth- man’s conjecture had been correct. The loglike objects were pushed into the stream, each carrying fully a dozen crea- Ghoo Gomaii S (S@ ne i, — _—> << t-* i. — * ag a ee =_ rae = Py OE a ee Tee es fs ee pO LIC A oe eg ‘ ome Cote ane Se 7 - Ae ~~" “a wary < - : 4 - Sipe = ; . ~ * 2 = 3