Paul had been worried about his delay and he had driven his ship hard. Not during the days of faster-than-light travel, of course, but after Paul had come down out of the blackness and could set a course by inspection. He had been either lucky or proficient. Even using a not too precise method of aiming his ship, he had still emerged from the blackness less than five million miles from Proxima, which was very good aiming indeed.
Pilots always aimed for their target on the nose. For one thing, the dispersion was huge because the slightest irregularity in any phase of the maneuver would throw off the point of aim by millions of miles. In years and years of spaceflight, the first direct hit upon target had yet to be recorded. In fact, five million miles was considered brilliant piloting—or as is more possible, it was brilliant luck!
Then as Paul found his landing-spot, he had pushed the BurAst P.G.1 hard enough to make her plates creak and Paul had descended at a full four gravities all the way to the ground. He had arrived before the radio signal had reached the planet and that was all he cared about.
So he settled back to wait. There was little to do but sit and think, and to watch the occasional meteor shower land on the dusty ground.
There had been an extensive shower about ten miles from the station shortly after his arrival. The impact was, of course, both invisible and inaudible. But upon impact the dust spurted upwards, billowing and flowing like the column in miniature that came from an atom bomb explosion. Since there was no air on Proxima I, the billowing dust rose and spread apart until the individual dust mote lost its energy and fell back to Proxima I by gravitational attraction.
He would have liked to inspect that particular spot because the shower had been spectacular. A number of meteors in a close-knit group had landed, sending forth a series of dusty columns—some of the larger of which were still visible when the radio chattered into life three days after his arrival.
It came all at once and its sound dinned his ears and re-echoed from the smooth walls of the Station. The sound snapped Paul from his place by the window-dome. It grated on his ears until he could rush downstairs to the radio room to turn the volume-gain control down so that the audio signal fell below the overload point.
From a raucous, nerve-tingling screech, the volume fell until distortion no longer fouled up the filtered purity of the signal-note broadcast from far-off Terra four years ago. Paul measured the signal strength and found it entirely satisfactory. He coupled the recorders to the gear, and then settled back to await the arrival of the modulated timing signals that were transmitted after an interval of straight tone, the first period to be used for establishing contact before the actual timing of the transmission-time began.
Once the radio signal was coming in perfectly, Paul turned his attention to the Z-wave receiver.
He tuned it gingerly, cautiously.