"Not quite speed enough for a true orbit," he told Murgatroyd critically. "I'd give a lot for a good map!"

He watched alertly. He could gain more height if he needed to, but he was worried about rocket fuel. It is intended for dire emergencies only. It weighed too much to be carried in quantity.

He spotted the city of Canopolis on the horizon. He became furiously busy. He inverted the little ship and dived down into atmosphere. He killed speed with rocket flames and air friction together, falling recklessly the while. He was barely two miles high when he swept past a ridge of mountains and the city lay ahead and below. He could have crashed just short of it. But he spent more fuel to stay aloft. He used the rockets twice. Delicately.

At a ground speed of perhaps as little as two hundred miles an hour, supported at the end by a jetting, hair-thin rocket flame that was like a rod of electric arc-fire, he swept across the top of the landing-grid. The swordlike flame washed briefly over the nearer edge. Very briefly. The flame cut a slash down through steel girders and heavy copper cables together. The rockets roared furiously. That one disabling cut at the grid had been on a downward, darting drift. Now the ship shouted, and swooped up, and on—and it swept above the far side of the grid only yards from the wide strip of copper which guided its force-fields out into space. Here it cut cables, girders, and force-field guide together for better than two hundred feet from the top. The grid was useless until painstaking labor had made the damage good.

Calhoun used nearly the last of his fuel for height while he said crisply on the spacephone:

"Calling fleet! Calling fleet! Med ship calling fleet! I've disabled the landing-grid on Canopolis! You can come in now and take care of the sick. There are no weapons aground to speak of and if you don't get trigger-happy there should be no fighting. I'll be landed off somewhere in the hills to the north of the town. If the local inhabitants don't pack explosives out and crack the ship to get at me, I'll have the facts on the antibody ready for you. In fact, as soon as I get down I'll give them to you by spacephone, just in case."

It was a near thing, though. His rocket fuel was exhausted when he hit the ground. The flame sputtered and stopped when the ship was three feet from touching. It fell over, splintering trees. It was distinctly a rough landing.

Murgatroyd was very indignant about it. 

 Prev. P 51/54 next