The first of the marooned survivors turned up on an asteroid. She was a gorgeous woman, and for all that her spacesuit had kept her in stasis for twenty-eight years, she'd hardly aged a day. The Martian was different. He'd been there four thousand years. . . . At least! Maybe longer. The ancient Martians might have made it this far away, but their spacesuits were nothing like those of Terra. So crew of the Elephant's Child was face to face with a hopeless absurdity -- an alien couldn't be there. But at least he was good company! -- You couldn't say that for the giants.

Author Biography

Geoff St. Reynard is the pseudonym of US author Robert Wilson Krepps (1919-1980) for most of his science fiction and fantasy work, though he wrote adventure tales under his own name, some for Slick journals like The Saturday Evening Post. As St. Reynard he began publishing work of genre interest with "Wink Van Ripple" in Fantastic Adventures for December 1945, contributing frequently to that journal until its demise in 1953. Work published here included the first Usurpers tale, "The Usurpers" (January 1950 Fantastic Adventures), which was followed by "Beware the Usurpers" (November 1951 Imagination) and the book-length "Mistress of the Djinn" (November 1950 Fantastic Adventures), which is fantasy. Under his own name appeared The Enormous Room (October/November 1953 Amazing; 2010 ebook) with H L Gold. Several of his works were Space Operas.