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ground hard enough to buckle.
Nakamura raised ship barely in time. For an instant he poised in the sky on a single leg of flame, keeping
his balance with snorts of rocket thrust. The bottom of theCross' stern assembly was not many meters
above ground.
Suddenly he killed the ion drive. Even as the ship fell, he spun her clear around on the rotator jets. The
Cross struck nose first. The pilot's turret smashed, the bow caved in, auto-matic bulkheads slammed shut
to save the air that whistled out. That was a great mass, and it struck hard. The sphere was crushed flat
for meters aft of the bow. With her drive and her unharmed transceiver web aimed at the sky, the ship
rested like Columbus' egg.
And the stars glittered down upon her.
Afterward Maclaren wondered: Nakamura might well have decided days beforehand that he would
probably never be able to land any other way. Or he might have considered that his rations would last
two men an extra week. Or perhaps, simply, he found his dark bride.
THE planet spun quickly about its axis, once in less than ten hours. There went never a day across its
iron plains, but hunger and the stars counted time. There was no wind, no rain, no sea, but a man's radio
hissed with the thin dry talk of the stars.
When he stood at the pit's edge and looked upward, Mac-laren saw the sky sharp and black and of an
absolute cold. It had a somehow three-dimensional effect; theory said all those crowding suns, blue-white
or frosty gold or pale heartless red, were alike at optical infinity, but the mind sensed remoteness beyond
remoteness, and whimpered. Nor was the ground un-derfoot a comfort, for it was almost as dark, starlit
vision reached a few meters and was gulped down. A chopped-off Milky Way and a rising
constellation the one Maclaren had privately named Risus, the Sneer told him that a horizon existed,
but his animal instincts did not believe it.
He sighed, slapped a glare filter across his faceplate, and began cutting. The atomic hydrogen torch was
lurid enough to look upon, but it jostled the stars out of his eyes. He cut rap-idly, ten-kilo slabs which he
kicked down into the pit so they wouldn't fuse tight again. The hole itself had originally been
blasted, but theCross didn't carry enough explosive for him to mine all his ore that way.
Ore, he reflected, was a joke. How would two men on foot prospect a sterilized world sealed into
vacuum a hundred mil-lion years ago? And there would have been little point in it. This planet had boiled
once, at least on the surface; and even the metallic core had been heated and churned, quite probably to
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melting, when crushed atoms expanded to normal dimen-sions. The entire globe must be nearly uniform,
a one alloy lump. You took any piece, crushed it, gasified it, ionized it, put it through the electromagnetic
isotope separator, and drew forth as much or, rather, as minutely little germanium as any other piece
would have given you. From the known rate of extraction by such methods you could calculate when you
would have four kilograms. The date lay weeks away.
Maclaren finished cutting, shut off his torch and hung it on its generator, and climbed into the bucket of
the crane at the pit's edge. His flash-beam threw puddles of light on its walls as he was lowered. At the
bottom he moved painfully about, loaded the bucket, and rode back to the surface. A small elec-tric
truck waited, he spilled the bucket into its box. And then it was to do again, and still again, until he had a
full load.
Thank God and her dead designers, theCross was well equipped for work on airless surfaces, she
carried machines to dig and build and transport. But, of course, she had to. It was her main purpose, to
establish a new transceiver station on a new moon; everything else could then come straight from the
Solar System.
It had been her purpose.
It still was.
Maclaren climbed wearily onto the truck seat. He and his spacesuit had a fourth again their Earth-weight
here. His headlights picked out a line of paint leading toward the ship. It had been necessary to blast the
pit some distance away, for fear of what ground vibrations might do to the web or the isotope separator.
But then a trail had to be blazed, for nature had given no landmarks for guide, this ground was as bare as
a skull.
Existence was like lead in Maclaren's bones.
After a while he made out theCross, a flattened sphere crowned with a skeleton and the Orion nebula. It
was no fun having everything upside down within her; a whole day had gone merely to reinstall the
essential items. Well, Seiichi, you did what seemed best, and your broken body lies honored with Chang
Sverdlov's, on the wide plains of iron.
Floodlights glared under the ship. Ryerson was just finish-ing the previous load, reducing stone to
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