On the screen an ashen-grey soil, spotted with wisps of heather-purple fern and tall grasses, gave way reluctantly to the edge of a grey, rock-strewn steppe—a typical patch of ecological poverty in the cosmological scheme.

‘This is the spot,’ said Brumas, ‘where the first team made touchdown. The prognosis was favourable. Getawehi has a breathable atmosphere at tolerable pressure, no predatory animals above the size of a mouse, and temperatures well within the range of working suits.’

‘I’ve still got twenty-one days due to me,’ said Van Noon plaintively.

Brumas ignored the interruption. ‘I’m replaying the recording at ten times its actual speed, so that the effect will appear exaggerated. What you will see is only one example of the kind of tricks that Getawehi has up its sleeve. In a few moments you will see the landing of the ferry. At this playback speed the actual transit time will appear quite brief, but we are mainly interested in what happened after it landed.’

The actual moment of touchdown was obscured by a swiftly-subsiding dustcloud, which cleared to show the egg-shaped lander standing firmly on its tripod legs but leaning at a decided angle from the vertical.

For the first time, Van Noon began to take an active interest.

‘Odd!’ he said.

‘It gets more odd the farther it goes,’ Brumas assured him. ‘As a matter of interest, it’s the only ship we’ve been able to put down without it toppling. Not that that did very much good.’

From the vantage point of the camera almost vertically overhead in space, the legs of the lander could be seen to be firm, but the angle at which the nose-cone faced the sky changed direction and deviated in angle in the most alarming way.

‘At this point we assumed,’ said Brumas, ‘that what we were observing was the failure of one or more shock-absorbers on the legs, and a hunting pneumatic servo trying to compensate. But it isn’t true.’

‘No,’ said Van Noon. ‘I didn’t think it would be.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘The lander’s centre of gravity. Even with a weighted base—which you haven’t got on a ferry—you couldn’t lean it at that angle to the vertical without it falling over.’

‘Very good!’ approved Brumas. ‘So what’s your reaction to that little paradox?’

‘I feel sick.’

‘I can seriously…?’

‘I was being serious. If the lander hasn’t toppled it can only be because its centre of gravity hasn’t been greatly displaced by the angle at which it’s leaning. There’s only one set of conditions where that would be possible.’

‘Which is?’

‘That the gravitational attraction of Getawehi is not perpendicular to the surface of the planet. On Getawehi, “up” is not only angled from the geocentric vertical, but it’s even subject to short-period changes of direction.’

‘This boy’s brilliant!’ said Brumas, glancing at Belling. ‘Now, Fritz, leaving aside the fact that gravity variations on that scale are a physical impossibility, let’s see how you do on the next bit.’

‘You mean there’s more?’

‘I haven’t started yet. This is only by way of introduction. You name the impossible, and Getawehi has it.’

The nose-cone of the lander swung to encompass three hundred degrees of arc in as many seconds, then the whole space vehicle gave a skip and a stagger, spun completely about on one landing leg, then reestablished itself about a ship’s diameter away from its original position.

‘Ingenious!’ said Fritz Van Noon.

‘Isn’t it? I thought you’d be intrigued. But the worst is yet to come.’

Having found its legs, so to speak, the lander adopted a fairly rapid series of gyratory steps while miraculously remaining approximately vertical. Its path was increasingly haloed by a ring of escaping crewmen, like frenzied ants encircling a honeypot. Each step the ship took was preceded by the curious hop-skip motion with which it had preluded its new mode of transport. Its continuing drunken dance through the fern banks soon carried it out on to the edge of the steppe. There it abruptly disappeared from view except for an unmoving brown stain.

Brumas swore and stopped the projector. ‘Sorry about that! I’ll give you that last sequence again at true speed.’

‘It might help,’ said Van Noon morosely. ‘An inebriated lander I could learn to live with, but I know from bitter experience that the abrupt removal of several million credits of Government money invariably needs a good explanation.’

After a brief interval the lander re-appeared, moving now at its actual speed and engaged in the last of its strides through the fern and out on to the plain. The extreme angle of its tilt was clearly visible, and its last swivel-round was remarkably controlled considering the vehicle’s four-hundred-ton Terran deadweight.

As the landing carriage touched the plain’s edge, one leg folded beneath its burden. The lander tipped sideways and began to fall. But more than falling, the whole ship appeared to dissolve as it toppled, the debris melting like candlewax dropped on a hot stove. There was a brief flare, scarcely visible in Geta’s strong sunlight, then there was nothing left of the vessel save for a large area of brown metallic stain on the sand-ash and a few chunky ceramic components which survived the remarkable fate of the rest of the ship.

For a long time Van Noon was silent. Then finally he spoke.

‘That was quite some trick,’ he said. ‘How’s it done?’

‘I’ll go into that later,’ said Brumas. ‘Right now the point at issue is that we’ve a job to do on Getawehi—a job we started but can’t finish. We’ve three supply ships orbiting the planet which we daren’t instruct to make planetfall for obvious reasons. And we’ve a twenty-man construction team stranded on Getawehi which we can’t lift off. We’ve had a hundred per cent mortality rate on transfer ferries attempting touchdown, and we can’t even communicate with the ground force except by line-of-sight laser channel, due to radio interference.’

‘All of which adds up to one heck of a problem,’ said Van Noon.

‘Precisely!’ Brumas and Colonel Nash exchanged glances. ‘But as I said, this is only the introduction. Colonel Nash is the one who has the real problems.’

Two

The thunder of fusing hydrogen died as the Labship Tycho Brahe, having cleared the necessary seventeen thousand astronomical units, transmuted easily into its hyperspace analogue and fled through the weird corridors of the dimensionless continua. Aboard, it was time for relaxation. Geta lay far out on the edge of the local spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Indeed, Geta and its single planet hovered right on the border of the vast ocean of interstellar space. The farther galaxies hung like incredibly distant islands in an ocean of darkness, with Andromeda dominating.

A five-day trip. And as the vibration of the planetary drive faded from the fabric of the ship, Van Noon forsook the computer and traced his second in command to the radio room.

‘Colonel Nash wants to see us, Jacko. At last we’re going to get a briefing on Project Ixion.’

Jacko Hine was not impressed. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Fritz, I’d rather get off here and start walking home. The more I learn about Getawehi the crazier it all becomes.’

‘Why? What’s the matter now?’

‘I’ve been checking the recordings to see why Brumas thought it necessary to use a laser channel to communicate with the ground force. I found the answer. In addition to an enormous magnetic field, Getawehi has an output of radio mush which exceeds that from Terra by about nineteen hundred to one.’

Van Noon stopped abruptly. ‘Synchrotron emission or static?’

Jacko dropped the memory chips on the table. ‘Neither. Modulated carrier waves. There’s no doubt of it. Long waves, short waves, vhf, uhf, and damn nigh into the X-ray band. You name it, and Getawehi has it. And some of those transmitters pack a punch which would make a Terran megacast station look like a spark transmitter.’

Van Noon began to look rather grey. ‘But there can’t be any such transmitters on Getawehi. Hell, Jacko, it’s

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