[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Ivan Rutherford Y Barra, Permanent Secretary of the United Planets,watched the thin trail of fire in the star-sprinkled night sky andfelt stirrings of familiar panic. Although he had greeted incomingrepresentatives of the inner and outer planets some three hundred-oddtimes during his six-year tenure as Permanent Secretary—although thecurved window through which he watched was a two-foot-thick panel ofplexiquartz—although he knew the descending space-ship was chainedto its landing beam more securely than Prometheus to his mythicalrock—yet panic persisted.
It seemed to Rutherford, as it seemed to everyone else in the receptionbuilding at Lackawanna Spaceport, as if the great ship from Venus wereheaded directly for himself, must inevitably squash him like an antunder a size-twelve boot. It was not a nice feeling.
He looked for reassurance, across the vast girth of the spaceport, atthe flood-lit faery-towers of Newark, rising like some odd subterraneanextrusion from the flat Jersey meadow. Behind him lay the long rampartof the palisades, behind the palisades the even more incrediblefaery-towers of Manhattan.
It would be nice, Rutherford thought, if the intricate negotiationsthat lay ahead of him could be managed as simply and safely as wouldbe the landing of the Venerian ship. He took his big Oom Paul fromhis lips, said to Mahmoud Singh, his personal secretary, who stood athis elbow, "Sometimes I wish protocol didn't demand our presence hereevery time a Grade-One space-visitor comes in. When I think of the timeconsumed...."
"Unfortunately it's part of your job, sir," said Mahmoud Singh softly.Like Rutherford he spoke the interplanetary Lingua Franca—ablend of English, Spanish, Russian, German, Hindu and Chinese, withmore recent elements of Venerian, Martian and Ganymedean.
Rutherford studied him through a cloud of pipe-smoke, wishing notfor the first time that Mahmoud were not quite so literal-minded.His secretary was an attractive young man, wearing his dusky Hinduhead atop the broad-shouldered graceful warrior's body inherited fromTurkish and Circassian forebears on his mother's side.
He wondered what might happen if Mahmoud's passionate heritage shouldbreak through the rigid shell of deportment that encased it—stoppedwondering as the uniformed space-aide at his other elbow said,"Oh-oh! She's still in a spin. Look out below!"
Rutherford felt a sick weakness invade his body. The Astarte,growing ever larger, was spinning slowly, inexorably, as it descendedtoward Earth. The inner core was gyroscopically stable, ensuring crewand passengers against disaster—but with the outer hull still in spin,the final braking blast might flicker death in any direction. He groundhis teeth hard into the stem of his heavy Boer pipe.
After more than three decades of uneventful landings at Lackawanna,there had been two like disasters in the past four months. In thefirst the braking blast had hurled its lethal brilliance to thesoutheast—and the southernmost tip of Jersey City had been sheared offas by some cosmic spatula. The second, five weeks earlier, had slicedoff the tallest of Hoboken's towers, spreading a rain of molten deathfor a radius of half a mile.
This time a sudden plume of pure-white flame—almost blinding eventhrough the polarized plexiquartz—flared out directly toward Newark.For a brief endless instant the faery-towers glowed golden—and then,like