Strangers to Straba

By Carl Jacobi
Can a ship hate—and have a strange hideous life of its own?
Like Robert Bloch, Margaret St. Clair, Frank Belknap Long and the late great Howard P. Lovecraft, Carl Jacobi won his first bright laurels as a story teller in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. He was one of that early group of supernatural horror story writers who have since turned to science fiction, and achieved in the newer medium a fame quite as illustrious and quite as enduring. We know you'll like this somberly exciting yarn.
They sat in Cap Barlow's house on the lonely planet, Straba. It was early evening and Straba's twin moons were slowly rising from behind the magenta hills. Outside the window lay Cap's golf course, a study in toadstool cubism, while opposite the flag of the eighteenth hole squatted the kid's ship.
The kid had landed there an hour ago. He had introduced himself as Clarence Raine, field man for Tri-Planet Pharmaceutical, and had announced urbanely he had come to make a botanical survey. All of which mildly amused Cap Barlow.
The kid was amused too. From the Pilot Book he had learned that Cap was the sole inhabitant of Straba, and he regarded him—and rightly so—as just another hermit nut who preferred the spacial frontiers to the regular walks of civilization.
The old man packed and lit a meerschaum pipe.
Yes sir, he said, efficiency ... regulation ... order ... that's what's spoiling all life these days. Those addle-headed scientists aren't satisfied unless they can dovetail everything.
Raine smiled and in the pause that followed cast his eyes about the room. It was circular and no attempt had been made to conceal its origin: the bridge-house of some discarded space-going tug. Along the continuous wall ran a triple tier of bookshelves, but it seemed that most of the books lay scattered on the table, chairs, and floor.
Above the shelves the wall was decorated with several three-dimensional water colors, pin-up girls in various stages of undress and mounted trophies of the rather hideous game Straba provided.