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superimposed grid on his own screen’s image.
    Eventually the moving ground features followed one of the lines and let him time their apparent motion.
    “Only zero point seven, from eighty-seven,” was the verdict. Belvew swept out over the lake without asking Maria for a heading, lined up with the patch from a dozen kilometers to the west, and eased back on his power.
    For just a moment. Then, reflexively and almost suicidally quickly, he shifted to rocket mode and nosed steeply upward, with a dozen or so alarmed voices in his ears.
    It was not a reality pause which suddenly blocked his view of Titan, but reality itself. He should have seen the slight dimness drifting down the center of his screen against the almost-as-dim sky, but he had allowed his attention to center too deeply on the proposed landing site. Most of his colleagues, even Inger, who should never have allowed any such thing to happen, had done the same.
    Rain does not pour, or even fall, on Titan; it drifts, not always down. The gaseous nitrogen is dense, liquid methane is not, and gravity is weak. Terminal velocity for a raindrop is very low, so drops do not get torn into small fragments as they do on Earth; and they don’t even start to descend at all rapidly until they are marble- or even eyeball-sized.
    A camera lens which encounters such a drop doesn’t break but does cease briefly to form an image, and the portion of Belvew’s Mollweide covering the space ahead of Oceanus went effectively blank though not dark.
    He could still see aft, but that was not the way he was traveling. He climbed sharply, watching airspeed carefully. At least there was no other traffic to worry about.
    He was out of the rain in a minute or a little more, and flying visually again as the lenses dried. The Titanian landscape ahead was less fascinating than the well-developed thunderhead behind, which everyone was now examining with great interest.
    No one said a word of blame. All who had been using the Mollweide image had missed the rain. They had all, including Inger, been watching the intended landing site too closely.
    Belvew drove deliberately back into the rain to restock his tanks—he had not used much mass, but had completely lost the urge to save time at the expense of low reserves—and circled while the cloud and its precipitate drifted slowly out of his landing approach path. He felt a slight temptation to pass up the landing and go back to sowing cans, but knew he would lose the resulting debate. Goodall would not be the only one against him. A pilot’s authority was not absolute unless he or she was actually aboard the aircraft.
    Fifteen minutes later, Oceanus was just where she had been when she had flown into the rain, and Gene was once more in the middle of landing procedure, easing back on thrust. His attention again was straight ahead.
    Most others’, especially Inger’s, was more diffused.
    He nosed up enough to split the result of decreased thrust between descent rate and speed loss, and reached the shore fifty meters above the liquid and a scant two meters a second above ram stall.
    Chewing his lower lip, which fortunately affected no waldo controls, he closed the ram intakes and fed liquid to the plasma arcs. There was a grunt of admiration which might have come from Goodall; the shift to rocket mode was almost perfectly smooth. The longitudinal accelerometer shifted slowly from zero to a negative reading, and stayed there as Belvew nosed down and turned his fires even lower. He was approaching wing stall now, and began increasing the camber of his lifting surfaces toward the barrel-section shape which had been used so few times before, and never by him. He suddenly realized he should have done a few practice stalls two or three kilometers higher. He convinced himself quickly that breaking off the approach and going up to do this now was not necessary, but he didn’t ask for anyone else’s opinion.
    The rippled surface of the satellite was forty