The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pygmy Planet, by John Stewart Williamson

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Title: The Pygmy Planet

Author: John Stewart Williamson

Release Date: June 20, 2009 [EBook #29177]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Astounding Stories February 1932.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

The Pygmy Planet

By Jack Williamson

[Sidenote: Down into the infinitely small goes Larry on his mission to
the Pygmy Planet.]

[Illustration: _It paused, seeming to regard them with malevolent
eyes._]

"Nothing ever happens to me!" Larry Manahan grumbled under his breath,
sitting behind his desk at the advertising agency which employed his
services in return for the consideration of fifty a week. "All the
adventure I know is what I see in the movies, or read about in
magazines. What wouldn't I give for a slice of real life!"

Unconsciously, he tensed the muscles of his six feet of lean, hard
body. His crisp, flame-colored hair seemed to bristle; his blue eyes
blazed. He clenched a brown hammer of a fist.

Larry felt himself an energetic, red-blooded square peg, badly
afflicted with the urge for adventure, miserably wedged in a round
hole. It is one of the misfortunes of our civilization that a young
man who, for example, might have been an excellent pirate a couple of
centuries ago, must be kept chained to a desk. And that seemed to be
Larry's fate.

"Things happen to other people," he muttered. "Why couldn't an
adventure come to me?"

He sat, staring wistfully at a picture of a majestic mountain
landscape, soon to be used in the advertising of a railway company
whose publicity was handled by his agency, when the jangle of the
telephone roused him with a start.

"Oh, Larry--" came a breathless, quivering voice.

Then, with a click, the connectio