Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 33: what you’re looking at

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

: Sore ne « -_ es 2 Bose rs Se oe grat a BL rE ar = =, 4 rey sis Le ne ee acai i. SeeNod - i cg me oe ona — 2 =< pes it ae AUGUSTINE By LEE CORREY If you’ve mislanded one hundred fifty feet of multi-million-dollar spaceship too many miles from anywhere—how do you get it off again? White Sands uses mighty complex facilities to service a rocket ship; is it cheaper to build a rocket base, or anew ship. . .? Illustrated by van Dongen ISLAND, by to cut!” The flame jutting from the stern of the spaceship licked at the deser sand as Pete Gilbert looked aft from the control blister ee, “Easy! Easy! Chop it! Cut!” 64 THE PLAINS OF SAN AUGUSTINE _ 65 Stan Hamilton jabbed at the red switch on his pilot’s panel, and there was a fees moment of sickening falling. With a pas —spine-cracking crunch, the ship settled to =, the ground, rocked twice, and steadied. There was dead silence in the cabin for long seconds, then Stan let out, “Whew! Made it! You owe me that million bucks, Pete.”” He pushed his microphone switch. ‘Hello, White Sands Spaceport, this is the Pendray. We are safely on the ground somewhere to the west of you. Over.” An impersonal voice replied through his headphones, “‘Roger, Pendray. Our radars have located you on the Plains of San Augustine. A helicopter survey party will be on its way shortly. White Sands clear.” As Stan turned things off, he snapped to Pete, “I’m going outside to look her over. Drop back into the boat-tail and have a look at the propulsion system, and I'll meet you on the ground.” He added as an afterthought, “And watch out for fumes. We may have sprung some leaks in the propellant lines.” ““Shucks, there isn’t any propellant left to make fumes,” Pete grunted, looking at the gauges. ‘““We must have made that last hundred feet running on the sweat inside the tanks.” After scrambling down the precipitous side of the ship on a rope ladder, Stan reached the ground and looked around. The country was as flat as a iddle for miles and miles and rimmed except to the north by mountains and low hills. There was little vegetation, just sand. And the heat beat against him like flames from a huge furnace. He walked a few paces away from the stern, sat down, and looked discon- solately up at the gleaming sides of the one-hundred-fifty-foot, multi-million- dollar spaceship Pendray. It hadn’t been much of a slip, just a few errors in the ship’s radar tracking circuits. But it had left the Pendray high, dry, and in perfect condition miles away from any road squarely in the middle of a flat New Mexico desert basin known as the Plains of San Augustine. Pete emerged from a hatch in the stern and clambered to the ground. As he approached through the sand, he called out, “‘She’s practically ready to fly again!” He joined Stan in the shade of the swallow-like wings and dug a cigarette out of his coverall pocket. “Great,” Stan observed wryly, “except for the fact we missed White Sands Spaceport by a mere hundred miles or so. The big question is: How do we get the Penny out of here?” h : ittod $4 Bo Ore hyn ) Foo bot ee Be tand AiO micbooks CO 3