dded. The rocket-sound cut off. Nothing happened.

"I think we could have saved fuel on that landing," said Jones. Then he
added, pleased, "Nice! The Dabney field's still on! It has to be started
in a vacuum, but it looks like it can hold air away from itself once
it's established. Nice!"

Babs rushed up the stairs. She gazed impassionedly out of a vision-port.
Then she said disappointedly:

"It looks like--"

"It looks like hell," said Cochrane. "Just smoke and steam and stuff. We
can hope, though, that we haven't started a forest fire, but have just
burned off a landing-place."

They stared out. Presently they went to another port and gazed out of
that. The smoke was annoying, and yet it could have been foreseen. A
moon-rocket, landing at its space-port on Earth, heated the tarmac to
red-hotness in the process of landing. Tender-vehicles had to wait for
it to cool before they could approach. Here the ship had landed in
woodland. Naturally its flames had seared the spot where it came down.
And there was inflammable stuff about, which caught fire. So the ship
was in the situation of a phoenix, necessarily nesting in a
conflagration. Anywhere it landed the same thing would apply, unless it
tried landing on a glacier. But then it would settle down into a lake of
boiling water, amid steam, and could expect to be frozen in as soon as
its landing-place cooled.

Now there was nothing to do. They had to wait. Once the whole ship
quivered very slightly, as if the ground trembled faintly under it. But
there was nothing at which to be alarmed.

They could see that this particular forest was composed mainly of two
kinds of trees which burned differently. One had a central trunk, and it
burned with resinous flames and much black and gray-black smoke. The
other was a curious growth--a solid, massive trunk which did not touch
ground at all, but was held up by aerial roots which supported it aloft
through very many slender shafts widely spread. Possibly the heavier
part was formed on the ground and lifted as its air-roots grew.

It was irritating, though, to be unable to see from the ship so long as
the fire burned outside. The pall of smoke lasted for a long time. In
three hours there were no longer any fiercely blazing areas, but the
ashes still smouldered and smoke still rose. In three hours and a half,
the local sun began to set. There were colorings in the sky, beyond all
comparison glorious. Which was logical enough. Wh