“That’s my spot,” Frank declared. “Just start me at the edge, give me plenty of rope, and let me work my way down. If Jotun doesn’t cut through a billion and a half years of stratigraphy, I’ll eat my hat.”
Bragg flew Athena south along the eastern rim of the canyon. “We swing inland when it jogs southwest,” he said. “Then we start looking for a place to set down.” He laughed a couple of syllables’ worth of laugh. “After the shuttle, that looking-around time is a luxury.”
They were down very low now, low enough to see individual trees-if those tall, dark green, stationary things were trees-in the forests. Snow clung to them, though summer was about to start.
The canyon changed direction. Bragg flew Athena away fromit. In a couple of minutes, he flew over some little rolling hills. Seeing them made Irv sit up, even against gravity’s new and unpleasant grip. He was not the only one who recognized them. “That’s where Viking set down!” Pat exclaimed.
“Sure does look that way,” Bragg agreed. He flew on. Before long, he flew over another one of the large buildings and the fields that surrounded it. “Hate to rip a half mile track in a fellow’s crop,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re gonna do any better. Anybody really want to try talking me out of it?”
Irv thought about it, but in the end he didn’t. Athena, he hoped, would be strange enough-and big enough-to win the humans the benefit of the doubt. Nobody else said anything, either.
“All right,” Bragg said. “I’m gonna do it. Let’s go around for one more pass to kill some speed and get nice and lined up, and then we land.”
Athena was so close to the ground that on the monitor Irv saw things moving around down there. Things… He felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck tingle as the realization hit him. Those were not things. Those were Minervans.
“Altitude 500 feet, speed 320,” Louise said as her husband swung Athena down. “Three hundred feet, speed 300… 200 feet, speed 290.”
“Arming the landing gear,” Emmett said. He lifted the switch’s cover, pushed it to the oN position.
Louise’s reading never paused. “A hundred fifty feet, speed 260…”
“Deploying landing gear.” Emmett uncovered and pushed the switch next to the one he had just hit. Athena really seemed a plane to Irv now; the noises and bumps as the wheels came down were the same as the ones he knew from Delta jets.
“Ninety feet, speed 240…”
“Landing gear down and locked.” Bragg hesitated, then bared his teeth in what was almost a smile. “We owe the Russians this one-the undercarriage is borrowed from the Ilyushin IIT6. There’s no better big plane in the world for getting in and out of unpaved fields.”
“Fifty feet, speed 230… 20 feet, speed 220…”
There was a jar. “Down! Hot damn, we’re down!” Bragg said exultantly. “Wheels locked,” he added a moment later. He reached out with his left hand and slammed the speed brake all the way forward.
“I hope you have something more historic than, ‘Hot damn, we’re down!’ planned for when we step outside,” Sarah remarked as they bounced along the ground.
“Did I say that?” Bragg sounded amazed.
So was Irv, at how gentle the landing was. He had experienced bumpier ones at Dulles. “Let’s hear it for Russian undercarriages,” he said.
They rolled to a stop. Pat was looking at an instrument cluster that had not had much to do since it was installed. “Temperature 39 degrees, humidity 48 percent, wind out of the south at… six knots. A lovely almost-summer day,” she finished. “If you’re an ice cube,” Irv said.
Emmett Bragg was on the radio. “Houston, this is Athena. We contacted the surface of Minerva at 2:46:35 P.M. Landing extremely nominal. Baby, it’s cold outside. Athena out.”
He got up and walked back to a panel just aft of the cabin. He might have been on parade; he conceded nothing to so many months of freefall. Irv watched admiringly. Soon enough, he would have to start walking, too. He was in no hurry about it.
Like the meteorology package, the panel Bragg opened had not been important while Athena was in space. Now it was. The mission commander started taking out parkas, snow pants, boots, headgear…, and pistols and ammunition pouches.
“Just in case,” he said, holding them up. “Time to go meet the natives.”
The scream in the sky faded a little-enough to let Reatur hear other screams in the castle. The mates and newbudded males were making an unholy racket. So were a good many adults. Reatur did not blame them. Were he without a domain master’s dignity to uphold, he would have screamed himself.
The first thud had slapped against the walls like a boulder of ice. When everything jumped, Reatur’s first thought was, quake! He took an instinctive step toward the doorway, while his eyestalks sprang upward to see if the roof was going to come down on him.
But only that one jolt came. “Funny kind of quake,” he said out loud. He started to go on about his business, but then the roar started. Fear of a quake, at least, was a familiar kind of fear. The bellow overhead kept getting louder and shriller, until came out of its belly. “There was something worse to be” said after all. Enoph said it. “It’s going to come down in our fields!”
Reatur had never seen legs like the monster’s. They ended in clumps of fat, black, round things like no claws or sucker pads or hooves the domain master knew. The deliberate way the legs descended from its belly was new to him, too…, or was it? The arm that had come out of the strange thing had moved rather like that. Were they related?
He did not think the monster would be easy to kill as the strange thing had been. Too bad.
Dust and crops and a little drifted snow flew as the monster’s legs touched the ground. Behind it, crops withered, as if it voided raw heat. Perhaps it did; even from some distance away, Reatur felt a lick of warm air as it went by the castle.
The monster moved ever more slowly. At last, not far from the edge of the cleared land, it came to a stop. The noise died. Reatur waited for the monster to notice him and his males-or at least his castle, the only thing nearby of a size to compare to it-and to approach. But it did nothing of the kind. It stayed where it was, as if waiting for him to come to it.
The domain master wanted to run, to hide. He saw, though, that while half the eyestalks of his males were turned on the monster, the other half pointed toward him. These were his sons and sons of sons and sons of sons of sons. They were under his power and would be as long as he lived. A third son of a fifth son of a fourth son might dream of becoming clanfather and taking a clanfather’s power one day and be safe in the dreaming, knowing it would never turn true. But Reatur knew he was as much in his males’ power as they in his. What he wanted meant nothing here. He knew what he had to do.
“Let’s go see what the cursed thing is,” he said. He hefted his spear and started walking toward the-the thing, he told himself firmly. If he did not think of it as a monster, maybe it would turn out not to be one.
Pride flowed all the way out to the tips of his fingerclaws when he saw how many of his males followed him. Against an ordinary foe-even against the Skarmer males, curse them, if Fralk was not a liar since the moment he was budded-
Reatur would have expected to find all his males coming after him. Here, though, he found he could not blame the few who hung back.
He muttered angrily as he came to the track of destruction the mon-no, the thing-had left behind. Its round feet made grooved tracks that pressed the ground down. How much did it weigh, to do that?
He looked at shriveled, sagging plant stems and muttered again. How much of his crop had he lost? Why did the monster have to choose him? Why not the Skarmer, who really deserved a monster’s attention? Thinking of it as a thing was not working. He gave up.