“We’ve been orbiting around it for some time, I imagine,” Drai responded. “Lee was supposed to head that way as soon as we got your suit on board, but he was not to land until I returned to the control room.” The two promptly glided forward, pulling their weightless bodies along by means of the grips set into the walls, and shot within seconds through the control room door — even Ken was getting used to non-standard gravity and even to none at all.
Drai’s assumption proved to be correct; drive power was off, and Mars hung beyond the ports. To Sarrian eyes it was even more dimly lighted than Earth, and like it obviously possessed of an atmosphere. Here, however, the atmospheric envelope was apparently less dense. They were too close to make out the so-called canals, which become river valleys when observation facilities are adequate, but even rivers were something new to the Sarrians. They were also too close to see the polar caps from their current latitude, but as the Karella drifted southward a broad expanse of white came into view. The cap was nowhere near the size it had been two months before, but again it was a completely strange phenomenon to the gazing aliens.
Or, more accurately, almost completely strange. Ken tightened a tentacle about one of Drai’s.
“There was a white patch like that on Planet Three! I remember it distinctly! There’s some resemblance between them, anyway.”
“There are two, as a matter of fact,” replied Drai. “Do you want to get your soil from there? We have no assurance that it is there that the tofacco grows on Planet Three.”
“I suppose not; but I’d like to know what the stuff is anyway. We can land at the edge of it, and get samples of everything we find. Lee?”
The pilot looked a little doubtful, but finally agreed to edge down carefully into atmosphere. He refused to commit himself to an actual landing until he had found how rapidly the air could pull heat from his hull. Neither Drai nor Ken objected to this stipulation, and presently the white, brown and greenish expanse below them began to assume the appearance of a landscape instead of a painted disc hanging in darkness.
The atmosphere turned out to be something of a delusion. With the ship hanging a hundred feet above the surface, the outside pressure gauges seemed very reluctant to move far from zero. Pressure was abut one fiftieth of Sarr normal. Ken pointed this out to the pilot, but Ordon Lee refused to permit his hull to touch ground until he had watched his outside pyrometers for fully fifteen minutes. Finally satisfied that heat was not being lost any faster than it could be replaced, he settled down on a patch of dark-colored sand, and listened for long seconds to the creak of his hull as it adapted itself to the changed load and localized heat loss. At last, apparently satisfied, he left his controls and turned to Ken.
“If you’re going out to look this place over, go ahead. I don’t think your armor will suffer any worse than our hull. If you have trouble anywhere, it will be with your feet — loss through the air is nothing to speak of. If your feet get cold, though, don’t waste time — get back inside!”
Ken cast a mischievous glance at Drai. “Too bad we didn’t bring two suits,” he said. “I’m sure you’d have liked to come with me.”