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fuel and water and food and workers. And slowly, with many a change in detail
as new things were learned along the way, the spaceship grew in low orbit
around the planet.
When finished, the ship was a huge globe, which could carry a crew of fifty;
it could stay in space, fully manned, for a number of years. She carried six
long shuttle-rockets,
each twice the size of the one which had made the circuit around Shining
Sister ten years before. Her captain was the man who had given the project his
single-minded devotion from his mother's breast, Vandro Hannaro.
Chapter Twelve
Two hundred hours after she had blasted out of her orbit around the home
planet, the
Sister's Visitor was in orbit above her destination. This time there was no
attempt at contact by radio. Shuttle Rocket Number One was launched even as
the ship's orbit was being stabilized. It spiraled over the Outer Hemisphere
inside the atmosphere, using ramjet power to pull it quite close to the
surface several times, and rocket-assisted jet to take it back out again. By
the time
Sister's Visitor began its second orbit, two planetary diameters from the
surface, the shuttle rocket was locked back in its pad, and the film from its
specially-designed cameras was already on the drying-racks.
As the photographs were studied and analyzed, the space ship slowly spiraled
closer to the planet, to take up an orbit a mere one-third of a planetary
diameter off. A primary landing site was picked for the delta-winged shuttle
craft, and four of them dropped free of the ship and jetted in toward the
planet.
Vandro Hannaro piloted the lead shuttle; his copilot was Lylla Rovorrido, the
girl who had won a place on the first expedition ten years before. With them
were a physicist from the Balkadranna Gang, named Yssa, and Zandro Garvanno",
the biologist. The two shuttle-craft that followed him down were piloted by
Dantro Fanzagarro and Karnna
Lassantro, the other members of the first expedition; they carried only pilot
and copilot, and were loaded with enough fuel to enable at least one of the
three to return to the mother ship. The fourth shuttle-craft, instead of
landing with the other three, used its ramjet engines to explore the planet
from the upper atmosphere.
They had selected the long, narrow continent, which, as they would learn, was
named
Dudak; and they had picked an area of what looked like open farmland,
cross-gridded with roads, some thirty kilolances south of a large town. There
were, Vandro saw, a small clump of buildings with flat roofs, and several tall
smokestacks. It could be the village of a sugar-planting gang. He glanced back
and forth between the map made from the aerial photographs to the screen
connected with the pickups on the wing-tips, which gave a binocular view of
the ground ahead, clear of the retro-fire jet-flames.
If it was a sugar plantation, they got their sugar from something entirely
different from the tubers grown on his own world; the crop seemed to be high
stuff, for there was a distinct shadow-line between the standing and harvested
areas. There was a section already harvested, big enough to set down all three
rockets, using the short-field stall-
and-drop landing techniques that had been worked out and practiced time after
time over the past three years. It was about five hundred lances from the
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clump of flat-roofed buildings. They were down to two hundred lances, now,
with the ramjet engines firing at full thrust. Below, they had been seen.
There were vehicles on the roads, and small dots that must be people in the
fields; and all were hurrying frantically away from where the shuttle craft
were going to come down. As they dropped a bit further, Vandro could see that
the people were reassuringly humanoid erect bipeds, with two visible arms.
"Take control, Lylla. Put her down so that our triangle apex will point toward
that village. Over about there," he indicated on the screen. "That should give
you enough room."
Lylla glanced critically at the indicated area. "With a whole lance to spare,
I'd say,"
she said.
"I have confidence in you," Vandro told her. He picked up the hand-phone and
called the two shuttles behind him. "Follow us in. Maintain the fifty-lance
triangle. Kwalvo, do you hear me? Where are you?"
The pilot of the shuttle that wasn't landing called in, "Kwalvo to Vandro. I
hear you easily. I am about three hundred kilolances away now, doing a photo
run over what looks like a small industrial city. I'll be over your
landing-site in about ten minutes, when you need me for the fireworks."
"Good. Stay about four thousand lances up, when you come in. Be ready to drop
lower if the natives prove too hostile for the display, as planned. If it
turns out that we need a bombing run, I'll want extreme precision."
"You'll get it," Kwalvo promised.
Yssa Balkadranna flipped the switch on the big screen in front of them to show
the feed from the rotating scanner in the nose of the shuttle. "Take a look,
Vandro," she called, "There's some kind of aircraft headed toward us from the
direction of the village.
I'm not sure, but I think it just took off from there. Can't tell yet whether
it intends to be hostile."
"Okay, Yssa. Lylla, put us down." He studied the image on the screen. The
plane was a big thing, a low-wing monoplane with twin jets on pods above each
wing. It looked like a transport.
Lylla brought the shuttle down, cutting the jets. It bumped along the field
for a few seconds, as the great flaps extended and killed the remaining speed.
The other shuttles came in right behind it, taking their places on the ground
in an equilateral triangle.
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