OUT OF THE IRON WOMB!
By POUL ANDERSON
Behind a pale Venusian mask lay hidden the
arch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of
those who needlessly had strewn Malone blood
across the heavens from Saturn to the sun.
Now—on distant Trojan asteroids—the
rendezvous for death was plainly marked.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds.
Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him.
There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque bowsprit.