（外文电子版资料）Andre Norton - Time Traders 02 - Galactic Derelict.docVIP

GALACTIC DERELICT Copyright ?, 1959, by Andre Norton An Ace Book, by arrangement with The World Publishing Company. 1 hot—it sure was stacking up to be a hot one today. Hed better check on the spring in the brakes before the sun really boiled up the country ahead. That ?was the only water in this whole frying pan of baking rock—or was it? Travis Fox hitched forward in his saddle to study the pinkish yellow of the bare desert strip between him and that faint, distant line of green juniper against the buff of sagebrush which marked the cuts of the brakes. This was a barren land, forbidding to anyone not native to its harshness. It was also a land in which time was frozen into one color-streaked mold of unchanging rock and earth, and in that it was probably now unique upon the riders planet. Elsewhere around the world deserts had been flooded, through mans efforts, with sea water freed of its burden of salt. Ordered farms beat ancient sand dunes into dim memories. Mankind was fast becoming no longer subject to the whim of weather or climate. Yet here the free desert remained unaltered because the nation within which it lay was still rich enough not to need all of its soil under cultivation. Someday this, too, would be swept away, taking with it the heritage of such as Travis Fox. For five hundred years, or perhaps close to a thousand now—no one could rightly say when the first Apache clan had come questing into this territory—these canyons and sand wastes, valleys and mesas had been dominated by a tough, desert-born breed who could travel and fight, and live off bleakness no other race dared face without supplies laboriously transported. His ancestors had waged war which lasted almost four centuries across this country. And now the survivors wrested a living from the same region with a like determination. That spring in the brakes . . . Travis brown fingers began to count off seasons in taps on his saddle horn. Nineteen . . . twenty . . . This was the twentieth y