The Project Gutenberg EBook of Anything You Can Do, by Gordon Randall Garrett

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Title: Anything You Can Do

Author: Gordon Randall Garrett

Illustrator: Leone

Release Date: December 23, 2009 [EBook #30742]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction May and June
1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

This is the illustrated, shorter version of the EBook #24436

ANYTHING YOU CAN DO!

First of two parts. The Alien was _really_ alien--and Earth
was faced with a strange problem indeed. They _had_ to have
a superman. And there weren't any. So....

by Darrell T. Langart

ILLUSTRATED BY LEONE

* * * * *

I

Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternal
night. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neither
fins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member of
some smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, in
turn, could pounce and kill.

But still it moved.

Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have told
that this fish was dying.

[Illustration]

In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder--long, tapered, and
oval in cross-section--but it showed none of the exterior markings one
might expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With one
exception, the smooth, silver-pink exterior was featureless.

That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discoloration
that ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters of
length. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying.

Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration.
Had he thought about it, he would