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would be no certainty about its ultimate strength until a real landing was made, the jet had come to a stop, and the wings lost all their lift. Might as well do that the first time.
    The convexity of the patch complicated the problem slightly. If he landed too hard—easy to do on the upslope side and, now that he thought of it, even easier on the other—the question of whether the crust was stronger than the jet’s belly and keels would also become relevant. Here too there was a designed but so far untested safety factor. A whole, especially an extrapolated whole, is never equal to the sum of its parts—Euclid had not been an engineer, or at least had apparently never considered synergy.
    The initial landing, a Titan day before, had been on a smooth shelf of ice near the foot of the upthrust side of what looked like a tilted block mountain; Titan seemed to be still active tectonically. There had been no trouble anticipated in detail, though of course the pilot—Inger, that time—had kept alert for the unforeseen. This was fortunate, since the rocket exhausts had started a thermal-shock crack in the ice which chased the jet for most of its landing slide. The pilot had just managed to avoid riding to the foot of the hill on several million tons of detached shelf by a final, quick shot of thrust. The three hours it had taken Goodall to steer the factory seed pod through its climb to the bottom, walk it to a safe distance from the cliff face and the new pile of ice rubble, put down its roots, and start it growing had been spent in a high state of tension—mostly by Inger, who was in no more physical danger than anyone else, but who was the current pilot. If he hadn’t been able to get Oceanus off again, little but remote mapping could be done until Carla lePing and her colleagues had the next aircraft ready.
    When it seemed certain that no replacement factory would have to be sent out, the fact that only a short length of ice shelf remained for takeoff had had to be faced. Inger had used maximum thrust, in rocket mode of course, and maximum-lift wing camber. While he concentrated his attention straight ahead, the rest of the group watched another crack chase him along the shelf, and more ice rubble fall, bounce, and roll toward the new factory. There was no longer any ice platform to land on when he did get airborne and reached ram speed.
    The two later descents to pick up cans, once the factory had matured and started production, had been on “ordinary” ground and proved uneventful. The drag on the skids, which all had feared might stress the aircraft too highly—this was why the ice shelf had been chosen for the first touchdown, though the ice was merely smooth rather than slippery on Titan—had been strong but not dangerous, and the subsequent takeoffs had presented no problems except a rather larger demand for reaction mass than had been hoped.
    Belvew remembered the ice landing vividly as he planned his present one. Some dangers were now more foreseeable, but concentrating on these might lessen his readiness to respond to the unforeseen as promptly as his friend had done. He could, it occurred to him, land on the ordinary-looking ground beside the smooth patch; the labs were mobile and could eventually get the information he was after.
    Except the strength of the stuff. That would have to be known sooner or later, and sooner seemed better.
    His determination to land on the patch crystallized firmly.
    Well, Theia and Crius were still available at the orbiting station, or should be in a few days, and the chance had to be taken sometime. No one would would blame him for losing Oceanus .
    At least not out loud. The aircraft was statistically almost certain to be lost sometime, and someone would presumably be flying it. But please, General, someone else .
    He called for a wind check—even a meter or two a second could make a difference—and held a constant heading for ten kilometers while Inger adjusted a