The Expendables by A. E. van Vogt -Vintage Science Fiction short story sleepstory audiobook human

This is a cracking tale from the hands of Grand Master A. E. van Vogt, involving a generation ship, first contact, aliens, telepathy, FTL travel, time dilation, robots, subterfuge, power struggles, the effects of rapid acceleration and deceleration on the human body...

A sub-light colony ship from Earth arrives at Alta III, after having travelled twelve light years over the course of five generations. The captain announces the lifeboat is to go down and explore, and the crew must view themselves as expendable...and promptly appoints the secret mutiny/conspiracy leader Lesbee and seven of his co-conspirators to go down with the lifeboat with orders to surrender to any life forms that try to capture them so the captain's men can assess the aliens technological advancement... and then the lifeboat is intercepted and boarded high up in the atmosphere...

The original blurb:
The alien was deadly, dangerous and inhuman—but he was not the most feared enemy on the ship!

Alfred Elton van Vogt (1912-2000) is one of the SFWA Grand Masters of Science Fiction and possibly one of the most influential Science Fiction authors of the 1940s. He has a very long list of short stories and novels (mostly fix-up novels based on his short stories, though.) His dreamlike, surrealistic and deeply human stories had a profound influence on such greats as Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison.
In the fifties he wasted a decade peddling dianetics, not writing any new stories. Luckily, he came back to writing stories in the early sixties. This story is from that comeback period.
Ah, yes, and the plots from two of his early stories were plagiarized into the plot of the movie Alien (yes, the in-space-no-one-hears-you-scream Alien). He sued and got a 50k settlement in the early 80s.

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Stories of Futures Past presents a vintage science fiction short story, narrated by myself, Tom Trussel. An actual, real living human being, warts and all.

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Copyright notice:
The written text of this story is in the public domain, as determined by the researchers and transcribers at Project Gutenberg, my own research, or it has passed the 95-years-since-publication mark. The story is and should be free for anyone to enjoy. Use of the audio is subject to license.

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