charge of this section."

"There was no fire?" asked one of the other men, looking closely at the
image.

"None," said the speaker. "We can't yet say what actually happened to
the ship. We have only a couple of hints. One of our weather observers,
orbiting at four hundred miles, picked up a tremendous flash of hard
ultraviolet radiation in the area around the three thousand Angstrom
band. There must have been quite a bit of shorter wavelength radiation,
but the Earth's atmosphere would filter most of it out.

"A recording of the radiophone discussion between the ranger and his
assistant is the only other description we have. The ranger described a
bluish glow over the site. Part of that may have been due to actual
blue light given off by the--well, call it 'burning'; that word will do
for now. But some of the blue glow was almost certainly due to
ionization of the air by the hard ultraviolet. Look at this next
picture."

The scene remained the same, and yet there was a definite change.

"This was taken three days later. If you'll notice, the normal rust-red
of the foliage has darkened to a purplish brown in the area around the
crash site. Now a Martian paper-tree, even in the mutated form, is quite
resistant to U-V, since it evolved under the thin atmosphere of Mars,
which gives much less protection from ultraviolet radiation than Earth's
does. Nevertheless, those trees have a bad case of sunburn."

"And no heat," said a third man. "Wow."

"Oh, there was some heat, but not anywhere near what you'd expect. The
nearer trees were rather dry, as though they'd been baked, but only at
the surface, and the temperature probably didn't rise much above
one-fifty centigrade."

"How about X rays?" asked still another man. "Anything shorter than a
hundred Angstroms detected?"

"No. If there was any radiation that hard, there was no detector close
enough to measure it. We doubt, frankly, whether there was any."

"The 'fire', if you want to call it that, must have stunk up the place
pretty badly," said one of the men dryly.

"It did. There were still traces of ozone and various oxides of nitrogen
in the air when the fire prevention flyers arrived. The wind carried
them away from the ranger, so he didn't get a whiff of them."

"And this--this 'fire'--it destroyed the ship completely?"

"Almost completely. There are some lumps of metal around, but we can't
make anything of them yet. Some of them are badly fused, but that