Part 16 (1/2)

”Tell them to call back later,” commanded Cochrane. ”Then leave the beam working--however it works!--and come up if you like. Tell the moon operator you'll be away for ten minutes.”

He continued to stare out the window. Al, the pilot, stayed in his cus.h.i.+oned seat before the bank of rocket-controls. The rockets were barely alight. The s.h.i.+p stayed as it had landed, upright on its triple fins. He said to Jones:

”It feels like we're solid. We won't topple!”

Jones nodded. The rocket-sound cut off. Nothing happened.

”I think we could have saved fuel on that landing,” said Jones. Then he added, pleased, ”Nice! The Dabney field's still on! It has to be started in a vacuum, but it looks like it can hold air away from itself once it's established. Nice!”

Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impa.s.sionedly out of a vision-port.

Then she said disappointedly:

”It looks like--”

”It looks like h.e.l.l,” said Cochrane. ”Just smoke and steam and stuff. We can hope, though, that we haven't started a forest fire, but have just burned off a landing-place.”

They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out of that. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. A moon-rocket, landing at its s.p.a.ce-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for it to cool before they could approach. Here the s.h.i.+p had landed in woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down.

And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the s.h.i.+p was in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in a conflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless it tried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake of boiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon as its landing-place cooled.

Now there was nothing to do. They had to wait. Once the whole s.h.i.+p quivered very slightly, as if the ground trembled faintly under it. But there was nothing at which to be alarmed.

They could see that this particular forest was composed mainly of two kinds of trees which burned differently. One had a central trunk, and it burned with resinous flames and much black and gray-black smoke. The other was a curious growth--a solid, ma.s.sive trunk which did not touch ground at all, but was held up by aerial roots which supported it aloft through very many slender shafts widely spread. Possibly the heavier part was formed on the ground and lifted as its air-roots grew.

It was irritating, though, to be unable to see from the s.h.i.+p so long as the fire burned outside. The pall of smoke lasted for a long time. In three hours there were no longer any fiercely blazing areas, but the ashes still smouldered and smoke still rose. In three hours and a half, the local sun began to set. There were colorings in the sky, beyond all comparison glorious. Which was logical enough. When Krakatoa, back on Earth, blew itself to bits in the eighteen hundreds, it sent such volumes of dust into the air that sunsets all around the globe were notably improved for three years afterward. On this planet, smoking cones were everywhere visible. Volcanic dust, then, made nightfall magnificent past description. There was not only gold and crimson in the west. The zenith itself glowed carmine and yellow, and those in the s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p gazed up at a sky such as none of them could have imagined possible.

The colors changed and changed, from yellow to gold all over the sky, and still the glory continued. Presently there was a deep, deep red, deep past imagining, and presently faint bluish stars pierced it, and they stared up at new strange constellations-some very bright indeed--and all about the s.h.i.+p there was a bed of white ash with glowing embers in it, and a thin sheet of white smoke still flowed away down the valley.

It was long after sunset when Cochrane got up from the communicator.

Communication with Earth was broken at last. There was a balloon out in s.p.a.ce somewhere with an atomic battery maintaining all its surface as a Dabney field plate. The s.h.i.+p maintained a field between itself and that plate. The balloon maintained another field between itself and another balloon a mere 178.3 light-years from the solar system. But the substance of this planet intervened between the nearer balloon and the s.h.i.+p. Jones made tests and observed that the field continued to exist, but was plugged by the matter of this newly-arrived-at world. Come tomorrow, when there was no solid-stone barrier to the pa.s.sage of radiation, they could communicate with Earth again.

But Cochrane was weary and now discouraged. So long as talk with Earth was possible, he'd kept at it. There was a great deal of talking to be done. But a good deal of it was extremely unsatisfactory.

He found Bill Holden having supper with Babs, on the floor below the communicator. Very much of the recent talk had been over Cochrane's head. He felt humiliated by the indignation of scientists who would not tell him what he wanted to know without previous information he could not give.

When he went over to the dining-table, he felt that he creaked from weariness and dejection. Babs looked at him solicitously, and then jumped up to get him something to eat. Everybody else was again watching out the s.h.i.+p's ports at the new, strange world of which they could see next to nothing.

”Bill,” said Cochrane fretfully, ”I've just been given the dressing-down of my life! You're expecting to get out of the airlock in the morning and take a walk. But I've been talking to Earth. I've been given the devil for landing on a strange planet without bringing along a bacteriologist, an organic chemist, an ecologist, an epidemiologist, and a complete laboratory to test everything with, before daring to take a breath of outside air. I'm warned not to open a port!”

Holden said:

”You sound as if you'd been talking to a biologist with a reputation.

You ought to know better than that!”

Cochrane protested:

”I wanted to talk to somebody who knew more than I did! What could I do but get a man with a reputation?”

Holden shook his head.

”We psychiatrists,” he observed, ”go around peeping under the corners of rugs at what people try to hide from themselves. We have a worm's-eye view of humanity. We know better than to throw a difficult problem at a man with an established name! They're neurotic about their reputations.