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Words: 38317 in 19 pages
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Illustrator: Finlay
COMPLETE BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL
LONG AGO, FAR AWAY
ILLUSTRATOR FINLAY
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.
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, but she looked at Soames instead of the complex instrument. She wore the multi-layer cold-weather garments issued for Antarctica, but somehow she did not look grotesque in them. Now her expression was faintly vexed. The third person in the dome was Captain Estelle Moggs, W. A. C., in charge of Gail's journey and the public-relations angle generally.
"I just chart the courses of meteors," repeated Soames. "That's all. There is nothing else to it."
Gail shook her head, watching him.
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