Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 103: what you’re looking at

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

THE SCAVENGERS and forget the last handful of aliens when Bennett’s voice came again. “The digger’s through. I turned it into a side passage and shut it off. And I hear the barrow coming for the stiff. You’d better send a few more down, we might need them in a hurry. Time is getting short, so we're just going to walk down this passage abreast until their room is in range of our gas guns. There’s nothing else to do. Judging by the intensity of the lighting they use we might be able to get close enough without them seeing us. I hope so, anyway. Here we go.” The voice stopped. Over the speaker came the measured tread of two vairs of feet, slightly out of step. Twelve minutes to go, thought Spence. The barrow carrying the Crawler guard rolled out of the mine opening and headed for the ship. He sent two others down to replace it. After that he never took his eyes off the scene being relayed from the tunnel. But there wasn’t much to see, just two shadowy figures outlined by the light at the other end. The image wavered a little as the pickup moved to keep pace behind them. Despite the intensity of his con- centration, the screen couldn’t fully occupy his mind. Not enough was happening on it. He kept thinking back. Back an hour, back two days, back a week. But, Spence realised with a start, a week ago he hadn’t even heard of this planet. Nobody but a few obscure astronomers had even an inkling of its existence. Then everybody knew. In the same way as some quiet, unassuming neighbor- hood is brought suddenly into the limelight by a couple of juicy ax murders. Five days ago the alarm had been given. Every unit of the Force in 101 this sector had lifted itself from its base and made the twist into sub- space. When it returned to the normal continuum it was eighty million miles from the Crawler planet and it was part of a fleet of two thousand. It had been smooth. Not a single hitch anywhere, Spence knew. First had come the heavies. Twelve hun- dred fat silver cigars, each half a mile long, had hit the planet in a wave and washed around it twice. The first time they passed, not a single thing moved in the great Crawler cities. The second time took longer—but when they swept by, the cities were empty. Then, their holds crammed with the dominant life of the planet, they had disappeared en masse into subspace. Then had come the clean-up squad, the Scavenger Fleet. The ships landed in cities which had been cleared of alien life by the heavies. When they took off again the cities blew them- selves to pieces in their wake. It was a bit wasteful, Spence thought, using bombs on empty cities, but they had to keep the Crawler survivors from returning to shelter in them. There wouldn’t be time to search them twice, because a common enemy would be along very shortly which would lap up Crawlets and humans alike with the finest impartiality. With the cities out of the way, the Scavenger ships had scattered to route out the stragglers. It wasn’t a very difficult job, but they had to hurry it a lot. There was no trouble in finding them. Any Crawler whose mind was working, even if he was asleep, registered on the detectors carried by the ships. Whether they cowered singly in caves or stood defensively at bay a hundred strong in some fortified position, it was just the same. A ship would flash over. Its projector would flicker invisibly down, then it would land and load the commiclooks.co im