Nice!"
Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impassionedly out of a vision-port.
Then she said disappointedly:
"It looks like--"
"It looks like hell," said Cochrane. "Just smoke and steam and stuff. We
can hope, though, that we haven't started a forest fire, but have just
burned off a landing-place."
They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out of
that. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. A
moon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to
red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for
it to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed in
woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down.
And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the ship
was in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in a
conflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless it
tried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake of
boiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon as
its landing-place cooled.
Now there was nothing to do.
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