Mission of Gravity Read Online Free PDF Page A

in an environment where a fall of six inches was usually fatally destructive even to the incredibly tough Mesklinite organism, his emotions were not easy to control. Subconsciously he kept expecting the metal shell to vanish from sight, to reappear on the ground below flattened out of recognizable shape. After all, it was still hundreds of feet up…
    On the ground below the rocket, now swept clear of snow, the black vegetation abruptly burst into flame. Black ash blew from the landing point, and the ground itself glowed briefly. For just an instant this lasted before the glittering cylinder settled lightly into the center of the bare patch.
    Seconds later the thunder which had mounted to a roar louder than Mesklin’s hurricanes died abruptly. Almost painfully, Barlennan relaxed, opening and shutting his pincers to relieve the cramps.
    „If you’ll stand by a moment, I’ll be out with the radios,” Lackland said. The commander had not noticed his departure, but the Flyer was no longer in the room. „Mack will drive the crawler over here — you can watch it come while I’m getting into armor.”
    Actually Barlennan was able to watch only a portion of the drive. He saw the rocket’s cargo lock swing open and the vehicle emerge; he got a sufficiently good look at the crawler to understand everything about it — he thought — except what made its caterpillar treads move, It was big, easily big enough to hold several of the Flyer’s race unless too much of its interior was full of machinery. Like the dome, it had numerous and large windows; through one of these in the front the commander could see the armored figure of another Flyer, who was apparently controlling it. Whatever drove the machine did not make enough noise to be audible across the mile of space that still separated it from the dome.
    It covered very little of that distance before the sun set, and details ceased to be visible. Esstes, the smaller sun, was still in the sky and brighter than the full moon of Earth, but Barlennan’s eyes had their limitations. An intense beam of light projected from the crawler itself along its path, and consequently straight toward the dome, did not help either. Barlennan simply waited. After all, it was still too far for really good examination even by daylight, and would undoubtedly be at the Hill by sunrise.
    Even though he might have to wait, of course; the Flyers might object to the sort of examination he really wanted to give their machinery.
     

III: OFF THE GROUND
    The tank’s arrival, Lackland’s emergence from the dome’s main air lock, and the rising of Belne all took place at substantially the same moment* The vehicle stopped only a couple of yards from the platf orln on which Barlennan was crouched. Its driver also emerged; and the two men stood and talked briefly beside the Mesklinite. The latter rather wondered that they did not return to the inside of the dome to lie down, since both were rather obviously laboring under Mesklin’s gravity; but the newcomer refused Lackland’s invitation.
    „I’d like to be sociable,” he said in answer to it, „but honestly, Charlie, would you stay on this ghastly mudball a moment longer than you had to?”
    „Well, I could do pretty much the same work from Toorey, or from a ship in a free orbit for that matter,” retorted Lackland. „I think personal contact means a good deal. I still want to find out more about Barlennan’s people — it seems to me that we’re hardly giving him as much as we expect to get, and it would be nice to find out if there were anything more we could do. Furthermore, he’s in a rather dangerous situation himself, and having one of us here might make quite a difference — to both of us.”
    „I don’t follow you.”
    „Barlennan is a tramp captain — a sort of free-lance explorer-trader. He’s completely out of the normal areas inhabited and traveled through by his people. He is remaining here during the southern winter, when