Rejecting the impulse to reverse course and run for Rigel, he kept stubbornly on toward planet number eighty-two, reached it, surveyed it and beamed the information. Then he detected a shipping route between here and a nearby solar system, started along it in the hope of finding planet number eighty-three and adding it to his score. A second propulsor shed its lining when halfway there, a third just before arrival.
All the same, he circumnavigated the world at reduced speed; headed for free space with the intention of transmitting the data but never did so. Five more propulsors blew their linings simultaneously. He had to move mighty fast to cut off the feed before their unhampered blasts could melt his entire tail away.
The defective drivers must have been bunched together off-centre for the ship now refused to run straight. Instead it started to describe a wide curve that eventually would bring it back in a great circle to the planet it had just left. To make matters worse; it also commenced a slow, regular rotation around its longitudinal axis with the result that the entire starfield seemed to revolve before Leeming’s eyes.
Desperately he tried to straighten the ship’s course by means of the steering jets but this only produced an eerie swaying which combined with the rotation, caused his fire-trail shape itself into an elongated spiral. The curve continued until planet eighty-three slid into one side of his observation port and spun slowly around it. Two more propulsors blew long, thin clouds of ceramic dust far backward: The planet swelled enormously in the armourglass. Yet another propulsor gave up the ghost.
The vessel was now beyond all hope of salvation as a cosmos-travelling vehicle and the best he could hope to do with it was to get it down in one piece for the sake of his own skin. He concentrated solely upon achieving this end. Though in serious condition the ship was not wholly beyond control because the steering jets could function perfectly when not countered by a lopsided drive, while the braking jets were capable of roaring with full-throated power.
As the planet filled the forward view and its crinkled surface expanded into hills and valleys, he cut off all remaining tail propulsors, used his steering jets to hold the ship straight and blew his braking jets repeatedly. The longitudinal rotation ceased and speed of descent slowed while his hands sweated at the controls.
It was dead certain that he could not land in the orthodox manner by standing the ship on its tail fins. He lacked enough power-output to come down atop a carefully controlled column of fire. The ship was suffering from a much-dreaded condition known to the space service as weak-arse and that meant he’d have to make a belly-landing at just enough speed to retain control up to the last moment.
His eyes strained at the observation port while the oncoming hills widened, the valleys lengthened and the planet’s surface fuzz changed to a pattern of massed treetops. Then the whole picture appeared to leap at him as if suddenly brought into focus under a powerful microscope. He fired four propulsors and the lower steering jets in an effort to level off.
The nose lifted as the vessel shot across a valley and cleared the opposite hill by a few hundred feet. In the net two minutes he saw five miles of treetops, a clearing from which arose an army of trellis masts bearing. radio antennas, a large village standing beside a river, another great expanse of trees followed by. a gently rolling stretch of moorland.
This was the place! Mentally offering a quick prayer to God, he swooped in a shallow curve with all braking jets going full blast. Despite this dexterous handling the first contact slung him clean out of his seat and threw him against the metal wall beneath his bunk. Bruised and shaken but other-wise unhurt, he scrambled from under the bunk while still the ship slid forward to the accompaniment of scraping, knocking sounds from under its belly.
Gaining the control-board, he stopped the braking jets, cut off all power. A moment later the vessel expended the last of its forward momentum and came to a halt. Resulting silence was like nothing he had experienced in many months. It seemed almost to bang against his ears. Each breath he took became a loud hiss, each step a noisy, metallic clank.
Going to the lock, he examined the atmospheric analyser. it registered exterior air pressure at fifteen pounds and said that it was much like Terra’s except that it was slightly richer in oxygen. At once he went through the air-lock, stood in the rim of its outer door and found himself fourteen feet above ground-level.
The automatic ladder was of no use in this predicament since it was constructed to extend itself from air-lock to tail, a direction that now was horizontal. He could hang by his hands from the rim and let himself drop without risk of injury but he could not jump fourteen feet to get back in. The one thing he lacked was a length of rope.
“They think of everything,” he complained, talking out loud because a justifiable gripe deserves to be uttered. “They think of everything imaginable. Therefore twenty feet of rope is not imaginable. Therefore I can imagine the unimaginable. Therefore I am cracked. Anyone who talks to himself is cracked. It’s legitimate for a looney to say what he likes. When I get back I’ll say what I like and it’ll be plenty!”
Feeling a bit better for that, he returned to the cabin, hunted in vain for something that would serve in lieu of rope. He was about to rip his blankets into suitable strips when he remembered the power cables snaking from control-board to engine-room. It took him a hurried half hour to detach a suitable length from its terminals and tear it from its wall fastenings.
During the whole of this time his nerves were tense and his ears were continually perked for outside sounds indicating the approach of the enemy. If they should arrive in time to trap him within the ship he’d have no choice but to set off the explosive charge and blow himself apart along with the vessel. It was of major importance that the. ship should not fall intact into alien hands and his awn life was a secondary consideration.
Naturally he was most reluctant to spread himself in bloody shreds over the landscape and therefore moved fast with jumpy nerves, taut mind and stretched ears. Silence was still supreme when he tied one end of the cable inside the lock, tossed the rest outside and slid down it to ground.
He landed in thick, cushiony vegetation bearing slight resemblance to heather. Racing to the ship’s tail, he had a look at the array of propulsors; realised that he was lucky to have survived. Eleven of the great tubes were completely without their essential linings, the remaining nine were in poor condition and obviously could not have withstood more than another two or three days of steady blasting.
It was out of the question to effect any repairs or even to take the ship up again for a short hop to somewhere more secluded. The long, sleek boat had set up an all-time record by bearing him safely through a good slice of the galaxy, past strange suns and around unknown worlds, and now it was finished. He could not help feeling mournful about it. To destroy such a ship would be like cold-blooded murder—but it had to be done.
Now he took a quick look of what was visible of the world on which he stood. The sky was a deep, dark blue verging obscurely to purple, with a faint, cloudlike haze on the eastern horizon. The sun, now past its zenith, looked a fraction larger than Sol, had a redder colour, and its rays produced a slight and not unpleasant stinging sensation. Underfoot the heather-like growth covered a gently undulating landscape running to the eastward horizon where the first ranks of trees stood guard. Through it, an immense scar ran the long, deep rut caused by the ship’s belly-skid. To the west the undergrowth again gave way to great trees, the edge of the forest being half a mile away.