“Red, you’re a genius.”
“Credit my polka-dot drawers,” he said and took over the helm.
From one thousand miles out, we saw a planet of greenery, blue water and clouds. As Red swung into our first orbit, our sensors picked up heat lines veining three land masses and reaching almost to the poles. We circled closer, dropping to the springtime, or Northern, hemisphere of the globe, and the signs were good. That grid had to be an artifact constructed by beings with a high degree of organization and engineering skills.
I went aft to the con, leaving Red at the helm, and switched on the viewer. Below me, I saw mountains and rivers and grassy plains, and once, over an ocean, I picked up the father of all hurricanes moiling the width of my frame. But there were no signs of cities, railroads, or roads, and no indication of why a gridwork of heat should lay over the continents. As we passed into terminator on our fifth orbit, sinking lower, my eyes caught the glint of an object on the west coast of the largest continent. Immediately, I locked the viewer in, enlarging. Below me in the early morning sun, I saw an artifact.
As it registered, I hit the “position fix” button and yelled into the intercom, “Red, I saw an observatory, plain as day. . . . An astronomical observatory.”
“Mark it, Jack. We’re going down.”
Red made a four-fifths orbit and retroed, mushing into the atmosphere as easily as falling onto a featherbed. He shifted to air jets, and the jets coughed, wheezed and bit in. Our lasers were burning oxygen.
“Yippeeee, yeeeow!”
“Erin go bragh.”
How beautiful the turbulence of air! How sweet the sounds outside of hulls! Once more for us, “up” was up and “down” was down without reference to the ship, and the pull of real gravity to the spaceman is as welcome as the arms of his beloved. More, as we planed lower into the thickening air, I saw herds of gazelle-like animals grazing on the plains, and once a string of copper needles stuck into a prairie, possibly communications relay towers of some sort. Suddenly I dropped to my knees on the control-room deck and offered up thanks for Red O’Hara’s green polka-dot drawers.
“Jack,” Reds voice interrupted, “none of these mountains top at more than six thousand, so I’m going down and level off at angels eight. ETA at the co-ordinates is twenty minutes, and I’ve got one helluva tailwind.”
“Roger.”
Out of the port, I could see the terrain below, looking for all the world like the Great Smokies and cut by winding streams. I could distinguish between the dark of evergreens on the northern slopes and the lighter green of deciduous trees on the southern slopes. These mountains were older than Earth’s, but the flora seemed very similar. All that was missing were signs of habitation.
“I see your observatory, Jack. South of it there’s a large cleared area. . . . Commencing approach circle.”
Red banked the delta wings and I got a glimpse of the observatory among the trees. A balcony circled its dome. Near the building, I spotted another of the copper needles peeking above the treetops. Now we were over the mountains again, turning back and leveling off, gliding down. I felt the nose tip up, heard the supercharger cut in and Red was standing the ship on its tail.
“Gyros!”
I cut in the vertical stabilizers, calling, “Gyros in.” The ship quivered from the torque. My seat tumbled in its gimbals, and the final approach panel was in front of me.
“Compressors.”
“Compressors in.”
The retro-jets bit into the air and the ship was falling, stern down, as gently as a leaf.
“Struts!”
“Struts extending.”
There was a clunk, a long creak and a final clunk as the struts extended and the pods locked. Without reference to panel, I could estimate our distance from the surface by the changing pitch of our jet whine, but I was reading the board with interest. Give or take a few pounds air pressure, a few percentile points favoring oxygen and a fractional difference in G forces, the life-support system of the planet was very similar to Earth’s, and the temperature reading told me that a balmy morning in late spring awaited us outside. As I heard the jet sibilance change to a roar and the roar grow muffled, I braced myself.
Except for a slight initial cant to the ship and a lurch as the landing struts righted it, the terror of the spaceman, touchdown on an alien planet, came off as smoothly as an elevator dropping to the lobby fioor. Not once had I burdened my Creator with prayers during the descent, so confident was I of the skills of O’Hara.
“All readings A-Okay, Red. Lay below to lower the ramp and roll out the carpet. I’ll rig the pavilion boom.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And mind your manners, O’Hara. I’ve got a feeling Mother Earth will be getting a batch of new customers, today. . . . And, Red?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If the customers are quadrupeds, keep in mind Navy Regulation 3,683,432.”
“Which one is that, sir?”
“Bestiality—punishable by a confinement of not less than six months and not more than ten years.”
“Glad you have it memorized, sir.”
As I opened the hatch on the pavilion locker and swung out the boom, I smiled to myself. Red considered my words as banter, which I intended, but I had not roomed with Red O’Hara for four years without picking up a little of the con man’s art.
In a con game, the most spontaneous gesture should have long-range ends in view. With the hatch closed and the locker empty, the pavilion storage compartment was also a brig with an outside lock on the door and the bulkheads padded. In the event of stalker’s fever overtaking a crew member, the canvas tent could be jettisoned in flight and the lunatic confined. Shoreside, the compartment would serve beautifully as a brig.
When I opened the hatch to rig the boom, the compartment was flooded with the perfume of growing things, and as I stood in the hatchway I heard birds warbling from the woods. Below me a meadow, brightened with flowers, sloped to a natural amphitheater surrounding a flat field in the valley about 500 yards from the ship. Beyond the oval field, the valley rose again to a bare knob and beyond that hillock more trees. Through the trees, I could see with my binoculars what we had taken to be an observatory, a white circular building topped by a dome that was surrounded by a balcony.
Above us, a few clouds floated in the blue and off to the west, the ocean gleamed against the sweep of a wood-covered and far-jutting peninsula.
“Look alive, sailor,” Red called from the ground, thirty feet below.
I looked down. He had lowered the ramp and leveled the square of red carpet which would form the floor of our exhibition tent.
“There’s no door to the observatory,” I called as I swung out the exhibit case.
“Maybe it’s on the far side,” he yelled up. “They could see us land, so they should be coming over in a few minutes. Shake a leg.”
I lowered the container and then hauled out the tent, a pyramidal suspended from a telescoping boom a little thicker than an auto aerial, to let it balloon downward, and closed the hatch to preserve the symmetry of the ship. By the time I walked down the ramp, Red was anchoring the sides of the tent with dowlings.
Within fifteen minutes, the Earth exhibit was