The Project Gutenberg EBook of Image of the Gods, by Alan Edward Nourse

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Title: Image of the Gods

Author: Alan Edward Nourse

Release Date: October 3, 2007 [EBook #22882]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _The Counterfeit Man More Science
Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse_ published in 1963. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on
this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical
errors have been corrected without note.

Image
of
the
Gods

It was nearly winter when the ship arrived. Pete Farnam never knew if
the timing had been planned that way or not. It might have been
coincidence that it came just when the colony was predicting its first
real bumper crop of all time. When it was all over, Pete and Mario and
the rest tried to figure it out, but none of them ever knew for sure
just _what_ had happened back on Earth, or _when_ it had actually
happened. There was too little information to go on, and practically
none that they could trust. All Pete Farnam really knew, that day, was
that this was the wrong year for a ship from Earth to land on Baron IV.

Pete was out on the plantation when it landed. As usual, his sprayer had
gotten clogged; tarring should have been started earlier, before it got
so cold that the stuff clung to the nozzle and hardened before the spray
could settle into the dusty soil. The summer past had been the colony's
finest in the fourteen years he'd been there, a warm, still summer with
plenty of rain to keep the dirt down and let the _taaro_ get well rooted
and grow up tall and gray against the purple sky. But now the _taaro_
was harvested. It was waiting, compressed and crated, ready for
shipment, and the heavy black clouds were scudding nervously across the
sky, faster with every passing day. Two days ago Pete had asked Mario to
see about firing up the little furnaces the Dusties had built