It was a heavy load. He took observations. He listened with straining ears to the small crackling sounds from the nearby sun. He re-computed: his rendezvous with the green planet while the Marintha floated on, losing momentum ever so gradually to the gravitational field of the sun, changing velocity hour by hour, yet always moving toward that imaginary point in space where she would fall into orbit around the green world, at the very limit of its atmosphere.
Then would come the moment of decision. Absolutely anything could be waiting for the yacht. It was already certain that a slug-ship floated on as the Marintha did, with the same ice-capped planet as its destination. But it had broken out of overdrive on the far side of the sun. It would not arrive before the Marintha had either made contact with a human civilization on the planet, or with a wrecked ship of the presumably human race—or possibly had run into a trap from which there was no escape.
Howell tried to fit the pieces of the Marintha’s situation into a pattern from which predictions could be made. But he failed completely. There was simply no alternative to the action he was taking. It offered only the remotest of favourable possibilities, but all other actions than this offered no favourable chances at all.
The Marintha floated on toward the meeting place with the green world. Clouds could be seen to move across its sunward hemisphere. As the Marintha approached, Howell hooked up an extremely high-precision directional receiver and tried to pick up other signals such as any civilized planet must let escape to space. There were no spark-signals. There were no amplitude-modulated signals. No frequency-modulated sounds. There was static from thunderstorms. There was nothing else—except the endlessly repeated broadcast call and minute-long spoken message.
“It can’t be a beacon,” said Howell harassedly, when the world he’d chosen was a huge round target shutting off much of the firmament. “It hasn’t range enough. It can’t be anything but a call for help! But what are the odds against our making contact with a civilized race by coming upon one of its space craft in distress?”
“What are the odds,” Ketch asked, “against the four of us being alive and coming to a landing here, with our overdrive damaged where it was when there wasn’t a star-disk to be seen?”
“That’s drama-tape coincidence,” said Howell impatiently. “Such things happen, as we know. But it’s only on the tapes that coincidences happen in succession for the benefit of the actors playing hero.” Then he said, “I’ll make one orbit as nearly over that peninsula as I can make it. We’ll try to see what’s down there. We’ll probably see nothing. If we’re not shot at, I’ll land on the second time around. This is the only liveable planet we can reach. We might as well land at the only place where there are signs of civilization. The beam-message is certainly that!”
They were very near, now. The green world filled half the sky before the Marintha. It seemed to grow visibly as they looked. The yacht would go on past the sunset line, and be swung around behind it by the planet’s gravitational field, and deep into its shadow. Then, to eyes watching from the peninsula, it would seem to come out of the sunrise and pass overhead. But the sky should be bright enough to make it difficult to follow. Those above, in the yacht, might have a quarter of a minute or a little more in which to examine the beam-signal site and to take photographs.
Darkness fell. The night-side of the green world was utterly black. Howell moved quickly. Radar told him the yacht’s distance from solidity, There was a magnetic field. There were no moons. Radar again, to check the height. Howell used the yacht’s solar-system drive to correct the altitude. They were far into the planet’s shadow then, with the planet itself a monstrous darkness that seemed to grope blindly for the Marintha.
They came out abruptly into sunshine, with dawn plucking mountains and islands and continents out of blackness below them. Two hundred miles high. The Marintha went hurtling onward, cameras making overlapping pictures of all that could be photographed at so low an orbital height.
Howell said at last, “Orbit’s an hour ten minutes. That peninsula should be coming over the horizon any time now.”
He listened with desperate attention to the all-wave receiver, still cut down considerably lest it call attention to itself by re-radiation. He heard no menacing whine of a slug-ship solar-system drive.
The peninsula appeared ahead, foreshortened almost past identification. Cameras recorded it as the yacht swept on. No signals came up. No blaster-bolts; Nothing, except once the soprano voice reiterating the message beamed out continuously to space. Its volume was tremendous.—so near, but they passed through the beam in seconds.
They saw the circular space, half a mile in diameter, that the electron telescope had pointed out. It still looked distinctly different from the,rest of the vegetation about it. From two hundred miles they couldn’t tell just what the difference was, save that its colour was not that of its surroundings.
The Marintha went by. No sign of life. No hummings, no whines, no cracklings save of storms somewhere unseen. The yacht hurtled onward. Before it reached the sunset line again, Karen and her father and Ketch were examining the pictures the cameras had made, magnifying them to try to see what existed at the spot from which the beam-signal originated.
Karen spotted it. A round, silvery object, the size of a pinhead even with the picture enlarged. It was in the centre of a half-mile circle of brownish appearance. It was not a slug-ship. It was not a ship made by the humanity of Earth. It appeared to be a globe of metal. Ketch made the one guess which seemed plausibly to explain what they saw.
“It’s defoliation,” he said. “It’s a wreck. They burned away or destroyed the foliage for a quarter of a mile all around, so a rescue ship could find it without trouble. Maybe we should have called down to say we’re coming.”
“No!” said Howell. “The slug-ship heard Karen’s voice and thought we were—these people. If they hear our voices, not using their language, they may think we’re a slug-ship. I’ll land an unthreatening distance away. Not in the defoliated area. If I did, they might start shooting.”
He listened again for the whine of a slug-ship’s drive. He heard nothing disturbing, except that he heard nothing. The Marintha dived into darkness and drove on into oblivion. Again Howell used the solar-system drive to bring the yacht into the exact line at the exact height for the action he planned.
Presently they came once more to the sunrise, and Howell used the drive with grim precision to lose height. When the strangely foreshortened peninsula appeared ahead for the second time, he brought his velocity down to tolerable atmospheric speed by further use of the space-drive. There was the roaring of split atmosphere about them. The speed checked and checked. The circle of brown colour appeared. Howell dived the yacht for it.
The Marintha was only thousands of feet above the surface, now. She came down and down. Ten thousand feet. Eight. Six. Four. At two thousand feet he levelled off, dived again, and the small craft skimmed across treetops, leaving a wake of wildly thrashing foliage behind it. Then she slowed. She stopped only tens of yards high. Then she settled deliberately, straight down. There was an enormous cracking and crackling of tree trunks and branches asher weight bent and tilted and then broke them.