rporation--"Buy on
Credit Guaranteed"--with ten straight minutes of commercials interjected
in four sections. It was the highest-priced show ever put on the air. It
showed the interior of the ship's control-rooms, with occasional brief
switches to authoritative persons on Earth for comment on what was
relayed from the far-off skies.

The first broadcast ensured the success of the program beyond possible
dispute. It started with curt conversation between Jones and the pilot,
Al--Jones loathed this part of it, but Al turned out to be something of
a ham--on the problems of approaching a new solar system. Cut to
computers back on Earth. Back to the control-room of the starship.
Pictures of the local sun, and comments on its differentness from the
sun that had nourished the human race since time began.

Then the cameras--Bell worked them--panned down through the ship's
blister-ports. There was a planet below. The ship descended toward it.
It swelled visibly as the space-ship approached. Cochrane stood out of
camera-range and acted as director as well as producer of the opus. He
used even Johnny Simms as an offstage voice repeating stern commands. It
was corny. There was no doubt about it. It had a large content of ham.

But it happened to be authentic. The ship had reached another planet,
with vast ice-caps and what appeared to be no more than a
twenty-degree-wide equatorial belt where there was less than complete
glaciation. The rockets roared and boomed as the ship let down into the
cloud-layers.

Television audiences back on Earth viewed the new planet nearly as soon
as did those in the ship. The time-lag was roughly three seconds for a
distance of 203.7 light-years.

The surface of the planet was wild and dramatic beyond belief. There
were valleys where vegetation grew luxuriantly. There were ranges of
snow-clad mountains interpenetrating the equatorial strip, and there
were masses of white which, as the ship descended, could be identified
as glaciers moving down toward the vegetation.

But as the ship sank lower and lower--and the sound of its rockets
became thunderous because of the atmosphere around it--a new feature
took over the central position in one's concept of what the planet was
actually like.

The planet was volcanic. There were smoking cones everywhere--in the
snow-fields, among the ice-caps, in between the glaciers, and even among
the tumbled areas whose greenness proved that here was an environment