The World Swappers
“Beyond the harsh brilliance of the arc lights the alien stars of Regis’ sky shone jewel-bright, jewel-hard, out of the polar night. His breath, and that of all the other men and women present, misted whitely as they exhaled; they clapped their hands and stamped their feet in spite of the encumbering parkas and fur breeches they wore.He stood at the control panel of the lighting system, alert to answer any calls for increased brilliance in the pit before him. This pit was a hundred feet long and perhaps twenty feet wide at its widest. Moving methodically along its floor, carrying sensitive detection instruments, were half a dozen men and women. Occasionally they broke the pattern of their coming and going to claw loose some promisingly hard lump from the frozen soil, crumble it, examine the result, and throw it aside before resuming their task.An intruder might have guessed at an archeological survey in progress. The guess would have been more than half wrong. For this was Regis, lonel...iest outpost of the human race, further from Earth than any other planet men had ever visited, and people had come here so lately and in such small numbers that nothing extracted from the ground would have said anything significant about their doings.Yet the guess would have been at least partly right, too.MoreLess
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