Asteroid Man Read Online Free PDF

heard any crash before his own ship hit, possibly because he was nearer than the others. They must have hit a few seconds after…
    He moved on…
    He didn't know whether he had walked a mile or two miles before he came across the next tangled heap of wreckage. The odd granular surface of the asteroid gritted and grated beneath his feet. He had no idea whether there was any atmosphere clinging to the strange world. There might be—there might not. He didn't feel like opening his helmet to have a look…
    It would probably be a pretty quick get-out, when he had had all he could take.
    There was nothing but this hard, bare, gritty surface. The asteroid was for all the world like a great cube of sugar, square and yet not quite square; rectangular enough to look as though it might be artificial. But that was a wild theory. There was a great number of rectangular asteroids… Nobody ever suggested that they were artificial. The next crash was right ahead of him now. It told the same pitiful story as his own ship. The men were so badly shattered they were hardly recognizable—fragments of ship and fragments of crew. He turned away, feeling violently sick. Poor devils, he kept saying to himself. What chance did they have? Squadron-Leader Masterson, he hadn't a squadron any more. It made him feel bad, very bad, deep down in the pit of his stomach.
    He moved on, finding nothing but rough, gritty, dark brown, granular "something" beneath his feet.
    It was like walking over a shingle beach with rock beneath it.
    He reached the third, and the fourth and the fifth.
    And everywhere the same story. Dead ships. Dead men. He was the only survivor. The only survivor of his own ship, and the only survivor of the expedition.
    Chance played funny games sometimes. Apart from the cut across his forehead, where he had crashed his head into the helmet, he didn't seem to have come to any other harm.
    He kept moving.
    He wondered whether he could compete the revolution of the asteroid before it passed on its erratic orbit out of the sunlight. There had to be something somewhere; it couldn't all be just like this. That wouldn't account for that radioactivity. He turned the geiger counter up again. The noise had not abated by one iota. It was louder than it had been before. He still kept moving doggedly. His strong jaw jutted with determination. He kept grinding on—the shingly stuff, hard and gritty beneath his feet, was becoming very, very aggravating. Greg wanted to destroy it, to kick it off into space, to walk on something smooth, instead of this constant slipping, sliding shingle.
    He felt that there was something pretty solid just a short way down, and he wondered how far down.
    On impulse, he drew the blaster from his pocket and fired. A searing destruction beam tore a jagged hole in the shingle a few yards ahead of him. The gritty stonelets spat and cracked and leapt in the air with the heat. He laughed. He felt as if he had hurt them. In an odd, twisted sort of way, it gave him a feeling of satisfaction. He'd have liked to have blasted up the whole asteroid that way.
    His mind had cleared almost completely now, and he was aware that something didn't ring true. Now what was it? He sat down by the edge of his newly smashed crater and thought. He thought hard. Yes… he snapped the metallic fingers of his suit as an idea suddenly burst upon him like a flood of light. That was what was wrong. Why had the gun gone off? The gun had gone off powered by its miniature atomic blasting power. It was a microscopic miniature of the three-megaton bomb that had been released. They had not exploded. Why? He drew a deep breath and peered hard through the red mist that still blurred his vision. The stones had leapt, spat and cracked. A wide hole yawned beneath him, five or six feet in diameter. Why had the big bomb failed to go off? That was the question. Surely if there was some kind of force field operating, it would have prevented the pistol from firing,