y 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
mountaintops, 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 rockets cut off. Slender as the flames 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 vision screens 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. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated and
the useless tailings carried away by a conveyer belt to make a
monstrous pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building.

Next to it there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. The
massive machinery could still be seen, but the structure was in
fragments. Next to that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of
the mine. They also