a very small grid. It need be only hundreds of yards
across and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would be
distinctive.

Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in a
temperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it many-fold, and it was
the mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something
which cast a long, lacy shadow. The landing-grid.

"But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go down
unwelcomed."

He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets boomed. The ship
plunged planetward.

A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise of
its rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforce
the sound.

"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have to
dodge some ack."

But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, and
its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin,
blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued to
descend. It was not directly above the grid. It swept downward until
almost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It
tilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops, and then tilted
once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was
plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there be
opposition.

But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowed
its forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidity outside
the framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhoun reasoned. But
it reached interminably toward the sky.

The rocket cut off. Slender as the flame had been, they'd melted and
bored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled and
bubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was no other
motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But when Calhoun
switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange of
high-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under the
vegetation of the mountainsides.

Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood up.

"We'll see what it looks like outside," he said with a certain grimness.
"I don't quite believe what the visionscreens show."

* * * * *

Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship's
exit-port. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once had
been a wooden building. I