The Gravity Business

By JAMES E. GUNN
Illustrated by ASHMAN
This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he—and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?
The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.
It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.
As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.
A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.
Then all was quiet—outside.
Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!
Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.
Now, Grampa, Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. That landing was pretty rough, Junior.
Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. I know it, Fred, he said, frowning. This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.