Acid Bath

Acid Bath (in Short Science Fiction Collection 034 ) The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues. Jon Karyl was bolting in a new baffle plate on the stationary rocket engine. It was a tedious job and took all his concentration. So he wasn't paying too much attention to what was going on in other parts of the little asteroid. He didn't see the peculiar blue space ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted to land only a few hundred yards away from his plastic igloo. Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's airlock. It was only as he crawled out of the depths of the rocket power plant that he realized something was wrong. By then it was almost too late. The six blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching him at a lope. Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot bounds. When you're a Lone Watcher, and strangers catch you unawares, you don't stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend upon your life.