The Earth Gods Are Coming Read Online Free PDF Page A

just nine years.
    He said to N'Gombi: "Well, captain, you'll soon be heading back to Solterra. My felicitations." Then, his voice unconsciously hardening. "You haven't made any contacts with alien ships—"
    "Alien ships?" N'Gombi's dark features expressed interest. "No. Apart from three routine calls from patrolling cruisers, you are the first contact we've had. We thought you were the patrol, although we did not expect any more. We're well out into the galaxy here."
    "Yes, we are. Well out."
    There would be more chit-chat, messages, news, all the trivial exchanges of information that the space-weary men aboard the CDB ship hungered for. But, for Inglis, the hurry pressed him in greater urgency, even, than the capsule droppers knew.
    Varese anticipated him. In this lonely meeting between the stars, he, as a spaceman, could sense the grandeur of it all; two tiny hulls of Earth filled air, meeting parsecs away from all that had given them birth were well representative of the vaulting aspirations of men.
    Varese said politely, "This has been most pleasant, Captain. But we are more pushed for time than perhaps you realize." He went into a technical explanation. N'Gombi listened with his head slightly down bent.
    "Yes, Commander. You would do well to head home with despatch. I know your cruiser type—commanded the old Wyvern— and you would be well-advised to reach docking facilities as soon as is feasible." N'Gombi hesitated, then, patently making up his mind, he said, "This is in itself a disappointment. I had been hoping that you were the patrol, they have the happy knack of arriving when they are required. I would have asked you to go to a solar system we just left. Unfortunately, during the dropping operations we lost a man overboard."
    "In space?"
    "No." The pain in N'Gombi's face was quite plain and distressing. "He was the despatch crew chief. A clamp hung up. In freeing it he lost his balance and went through the bomb bay doors with the capsule. His men last saw him in his suit clinging to the capsule handling rings."
    Varese swore. "That's terrible. In that type of capsule handling chute he would easily have ridden the capsule to the surface. He'd have landed with it!"
    "Quite so, commander. One of my men has been marooned alive on that unknown planet."
    "God!" Inglis said softy to himself. He didn't often swear. But this story chilled him. Of course, the big CDB ship could not make planetfall and her orders did not allow for unscheduled stops at planets. The Dissemination ships fleeted in from space, made one revolution of a planet, dropped their capsule, and fled to the next. Time was too precious to lose. He knew. He'd served nine years of it; the long stretches of boredom and then the livid activity docketting a planet and sending down the Prophet in its capsule.
    "We're on a pretty important mission, Captain," Varese was saying doubtfully. "If we'd been merely a routine patrol we would be on our way to pick your man up. Lives are precious. But—"
    Inglis made up his mind. "This mission has been shot already," he said firmly. "We can make one more solar system and then head home. We might as well make it the system where this unfortunate man was lost." He did not mention that the failure of his own personal mission from Gus Rattigan would not be rectified by picking up a hundred stranded crewmen.
    "If you'd be good enough to pass all the details to Commander Varese, co-ordinates, everything, we'll get along."
    He could have made an issue of it. Been reluctant. At last been swayed by the other's pleas. But spacemen-real spacemen—did not operate like that, whether they professed the universal religion or not. Comradeship in space was a strong bond extending even to a solitary crewman stranded upon a primitive planet.
    Inglis listened with only half an ear to the details.
    The Evil Ones—the hostile aliens, the extra-terrestrials who thought along lines abhorrent to men, call them what you will—were not going