Then their pod had touched down, with final relative velocity of only half a meter a second — and all transmissions had ceased, instantly. Whatever had killed Jan and Sven Wicklund, direct impact with the surface couldn’t be the culprit. They had landed gently. And if they hadn’t been killed by collision when they landed…

I tried to ignore the tiny bud of hope that wanted to open in my mind. I had never heard of a pod being destroyed without also killing anyone inside it.

Our instruments had added a few new (and odd) facts to that earlier picture. The “atmosphere” we were seeing now was mainly dust, a great swirling storm across the whole of Vandell, littered by lightning flashes through the upper part. It was hot, a furnace breath that had no right to exist. Vandell was supposed to be cold. Goddammit, it should be drained of every last calorie of heat. McAndrew had told me so, there was no way the planet could be warm.

Round and round, orbit after orbit; we went on until I felt that we were a fixed center and the whole universe was gyrating around us, while I stared at that black vortex (it came and went from one orbit to the next, now you see it, now you don’t) and McAndrew sat glued to the data displays. I don’t think he looked at Vandell itself for more than ten seconds in five hours. He was thinking.

And me? The pressure inside was growing — tearing me apart. According to Limperis and Wenig, I’m cautious to a fault. Where angels fear to tread, I not only won’t rush in, I don’t want to go near the place. That’s one reason they like to have me around, to exercise my high cowardice quotient. But now I wanted to fire our retro-rockets and get down there, down onto Vandell. Twice I had seated myself at the controls, and fingered the preliminary descent sequence (second nature, I could have done that in my sleep). And twice McAndrew had emerged from his reverie, shook his head, and spoken: “No, Jeanie.”

But the third time he didn’t stop me.

“D’ye know where you’re going to put her down, Jeanie?” was all he said.

“Roughly.” I didn’t like the sound of my voice at all. Too scratchy and husky. “I’ve got the approximate landing position from Merganser’s readings.”

“Not there.” He was shaking his head. “Not quite there. See it, the black tube? Put us down the middle of that funnel — can you do it?”

“I can. But if it’s what it looks like, we’ll get heavy turbulence.”

“Aye, I’ll agree with that.” He shrugged. “That’s where they are, though, for a bet. Can you do it?”

That wasn’t his real question. As he was speaking, I began to slide us in along a smooth descent trajectory. There was nothing to the calculation of our motion, we both recognized that. Given our desired touchdown location, the pod’s computer would have a minimum fuel descent figured in fractions of a second.

I know McAndrew very well. What he was saying — not in words, that wasn’t his style — was simple: It’s going to be dangerous, and I’m not sure how dangerous. Do you want to do it?

I began to see why as soon as we were inside the atmosphere. Visibility went down to zero. We were descending through thick smoke-like dust and flickering lightning. I switched to radar vision, and found I was looking down to a murky, surrealistic world, with a shattered, twisted surface. Heavy winds (without an atmosphere? — what were winds?) moved us violently from side to side, up and down, with sickening free-fall drops arrested by the drive as soon as they were started.

Thirty seconds to contact, and below us the ground heaved and rolled like a sick giant. Down and down, along the exact center of the black funnel. The pod shook and shivered around us. The automatic controls seemed to be doing poorly, but I knew I’d be worse — my reaction times were a thousandfold too slow to compete. All we could do was hold tight and wait for the collision.

Which never came. We didn’t make a featherbed landing, but the final jolt was just a few centimeters a second. Or was it more? I couldn’t say. It was lost in the continuing shuddering movements of the ground that the pod rested on. The planet beneath us was alive. I stood up, then had to hold onto the edge of the control desk to keep my feet. I smiled at McAndrew (quite an effort) as he began an unsteady movement towards the equipment locker.

He nodded at me. Earthquake country.

I nodded back. Where is their ship?

We had landed on a planet almost as big as Earth, in the middle of a howling dust storm that reduced visibility to less than a hundred yards. Now we were proposing to search an area of a couple of hundred million square miles — for an object a few meters across. The needle in a haystack had nothing on this. Mac didn’t seem worried. He was putting on an external support pack — we had donned suits during the first phase of descent.

“Mac!”

He paused with the pack held against his chest and the connectors held in one hand. “Don’t be daft, Jeanie. Only one of us should be out there.”

And that made me mad. He was being logical (my specialty). But to come more than a light-year, and then for one of us go the last few miles… Jan was my daughter too — my only daughter. I moved forward and picked up another of the packs. After one look at my face, Mac didn’t argue.

At least we had enough sense not to venture outside at once. Suited up, we completed the systematic scan of our surroundings. The visual wavelengths were useless — we couldn’t see a thing through the ports — but the microwave sensors let us look to the horizon. And a wild horizon it was. Spikes of sharp rock sat next to crumbling mesas, impenetrable crevasses, and tilted blocks of dark stone, randomly strewn across the landscape.

I could see no pattern at all, no rule of formation. But over to one side, less than a mile from our pod, our instruments were picking up a bright radar echo, a reflection peak stronger than anything that came from the rocky surface. It must be metal — could only be metal — could only be Jan’s ship. But was it intact? Lightning-fused? A scoured hulk? A shattered remnant, open to dust and vacuum?

My thoughts came too fast to follow. Before they had reached any conclusion we had moved to the lock, opened it, and were standing on the broken surface of Vandell. McAndrew automatically fell behind to let me take the lead. Neither of us had any experience with this type of terrain, but he knew my antennae for trouble were better than his. I tuned my suit to the reflected radar signal from our pod and we began to pick our way carefully forward.

It was a grim, tortuous progress. There was no direct path that could be taken across the rocks. Every tenth step seemed to bring me to a dead end, a place where we had to retrace our steps halfway back to our own pod. Beneath our feet, the surface of the planet shivered and groaned, as though it was ready to open up and swallow us. The landscape as our suits presented it to us was a scintillating nightmare of blacks and grays. (Vision in nonvisible wavelengths is always disconcerting — microwave more than most).

Around us, the swirling dust came in shivering waves that whispered along the outside of our helmets. I could detect a definite cycle, with a peak every seven minutes or so. Radio static followed the same period, rising and falling in volume to match the disturbance outside.

I had tuned my set to maximum gain and was transmitting a continuous call signal. Nothing came back from the bright radar blip of the other pod. It was now only a couple of hundred yards ahead but we were approaching agonizingly slowly.

At fifty yards I noticed a lull in the rustle around us. I switched to visible wavelengths, and waited impatiently while the suit’s processor searched for the best combination of frequencies to penetrate the murk. After half a second the internal suit display announced that there would be a short delay; the sensors were covered with ionized dust particles that would have to be repelled. That took another ten seconds, then I had an image. Peering ahead on visible wavelengths I thought I could see a new shape in front of us, a flat oval hugging the dark ground.