And then I noticed that, weirdly, there seemed light inherent to these
Zurian rock-masses. Some of the cave-mouths were not quite black--a
little light appeared in them, glowing with a prismatic sheen.
A thousand feet. I was at the gravity control-board now, executing Dr.
Livingston's swift murmured orders. Without our modern rocket-streams,
the little _Planeteer_, I must admit, was unwieldy. We were dropping
slowly, with a side drift. In a corner Alan sat staring at us, with his
hands gripped between his knees, his fingers working nervously. Duroh
and Carruthers were standing tense beside me.
It was a touchy few minutes. We were some two hundred feet above a
broken ice-strewn plateau, with a side drift that was carrying us
toward a small cliff. I could see where Dr. Livingston intended to land
now--a little shallow bowl-depression near the cliff, where the bottom
seemed flat, with soft snow. The _Planeteer_ was hovering upright, with
a very slow, vertical axis rotation, so that as I used the cliff's
repulsion to check our drift, I was shifting the current constantly in
our side gravity plates.
Queer how one may think of two things at once! I was seated at the
control table, with my fingers roving its gravity-plate shifting keys.
Dr. Livingston was tensely peering through the side bull's-eyes,
gauging our position, our downward and sidewise drift; calling out
to me his orders. Certainly my mind had never been more alertly on
anything than it now was on those gravity keys. But nevertheless,
suddenly I was aware of an electric feeling here in the control room.
Carruthers and Duroh exchanging glances. And over in the corner young
Alan, with his hands between his knees, his fingers writhing, his dark
gaze brooding on me.
"Base negation! Full--quickly now!" Dr. Livingston called.
We were almost over the snowy depression--hardly the height of the
_Planeteer_ above it. I flung on the base repulsion; held it only some
ten seconds. Then gave attraction for an instant.
That may have been the first landing of any space-ship in the history
of the Universe. I do not know, of course; but I will say we eased
the little _Planeteer_ down as light as a falling snowdrop. There was
hardly a bump as we landed, with the base flat in the melting snow, and
the globe of the _Planeteer_ almost exactly upright.
"Good enough, John. We did it!" Dr. Livingston was triumphant. He swung
toward me, his face flushed with pleasure. Jim Carruthers was close
beside him. "Good work, wasn't it, Jim?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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