The Project Gutenberg EBook of Home is Where You Left It, by Adam Chase

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Title: Home is Where You Left It

Author: Adam Chase

Release Date: June 19, 2010 [EBook #32890]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT

By ADAM CHASE

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February
1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Illustration: The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal
nightmare.]

[Sidenote: _How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous
traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?
That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero._]

Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when
he reached the village.

He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,
parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's
unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred
miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'
second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like
a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.

He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on
his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the
single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick
house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof
now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed
in a _Kumaji_ raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest
time as a boy.

He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked
as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and
brought the ladle to his lips.

He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.

Poisoned.

H