Anything You Can Do ...

Anything You Can Do ...

By

3.25
(4 Reviews)
Anything You Can Do ... by Randall Garrett

Published:

1963

Pages:

172

Downloads:

6,910

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Anything You Can Do ...

By

3.25
(4 Reviews)
One shipwrecked alien against the power of an entire planet means a losing battle... until Earth builds superman!

Book Excerpt

his time there was no delay. "Yes?"

"How are the radiation detectors behaving there, Grandfather?"

"One moment. I shall see." There was a silence. Then: "No unusual activity, young Wang. Why?"

Wang told him. Then he asked: "Did you get hold of the air transport authorities?"

"Yes. They have no missing aircraft, but they're checking with the space fields. The way you describe it, the thing must be a spaceship of some kind."

"I think so too. I wish I had a radiation detector here, though. I'd like to know whether that thing is hot or not. It's only a couple of miles away--maybe a little more--and if that blue glow is ionization caused by radiation, it's much too close for comfort."

"I think any source that strong would register on our detectors here, young Wang," said the old man in his dry voice. "However, I agree that it might not be the pinnacle of wisdom to approach the source too closely."

"Clear your mind of worry, Grandfather," Wang said. "I accept your wo

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An alien crashes on Earth, and is unable to believe humans run the place. So he kills and eats them (raw). Eventually he is tracked down, but the bigwigs don't want him killed, they want him captured. So they set a huge decade-long plan into effect.
An okay story. Some of the medical technology is a bit far-fetched, and the nuclear war seems to have made women scarce, but it'll do for a pre-teen.
Excellent first contact story. A bit on the gory side though, but it is really about totallydifferent cultural programming. Aliens would have to be alien. More interesting than NOR CRYSTAL TEARS by Alan Dean Foster.

The business with the twins is kind of conveniently contrived, but otherwise quite interesting.
Yipe! it's the Nipe. a caterpillar shaped alien that is marooned on earth after a catastrophic failure of his starship. The Nipe is a very fast caterpillar (about 3 feet tall) and can kill and eat a human rikki-tik, before they know what hit them. He kills and eats for his own cultural reasons, but must be stopped, tamed and brought to heel. Who better than an artifically enhanced speeded up human who is one half of an strange identical twin set, the nature of which is rather confusing, even at the end of the tale.

Anyway there is the eventual showdown, but the most interesting part of this story is the human's monitoring of the Nipe and the analysis of the Nipe's alien mind and cultural behavior leading to a elegant strategy to defeat him before he can contact his buddies and flood earth with nasty, carnivorous, speedy caterpillars. Kinda fun read, but for the strange addition of the twins story.
2
Alien shipwrecks, goes mad, kills people, is killed by superman. All this in a boring way. I've read better stories from Garrett.