The Project Gutenberg EBook of Long Ago, Far Away, by
William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

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Title: Long Ago, Far Away

Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

Illustrator: Finlay

Release Date: December 18, 2007 [EBook #23892]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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COMPLETE
BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL

LONG AGO,
FAR AWAY

By MURRAY LEINSTER

ILLUSTRATOR FINLAY

CHAPTER 1

The sky was black, with myriads of stars. The ground was white. But it
was not really ground at all, it was ice that covered everything--twenty
miles north to the Barrier, and southward to the Pole itself, past
towering mountains and howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining.

The base was almost buried in snow. Off to one side of the main building
a faint yellowish glow was the plastic dome of the meteor-watch radar
instrument. Inside Brad Soames displayed his special equipment to a girl
reporter flown down to the Antarctic to do human-interest articles for
not-too-much-interested women readers.

[Illustration: The children huddled together to protect themselves and
their ship from the inquisitive strangers.]

All was quiet. This seemed the most unlikely of all possible places for
anything of importance to happen.

There was one man awake, on stand-by watch. A radio glowed beside him--a
short-wave unit, tuned to the frequency used by all the bases of all the
nations on Antarctica--English, French, Belgian, Danish, Russian. The
stand-by man yawned. There was nothing to do.

* * * * *

"There's no story in my work," said Soames politely. "I work with this
wave-guide radar. It's set to explore the sky instead of the horizon. It
spots meteors coming in from space, records their height and course and
speed, and follows them down until they burn up in the air. From its
record we can figure out the orbits they followed before Earth's gravity
pulled them down."

The girl reporter was Gail Haynes. She nodded, b