The whistling of the big ship's passage through the air slid down the audible scale as the velocity dropped. The ship slowed, and came to a perfect landing—
Twelve feet above the surface!
Like a slug of lead, the Haywire Queen poised for the barest instant, and then dropped the intervening distance. The landing plates sank into the soft soil of Telfu for several feet and the plates groaned, a rivet or two squeaked, and some welded joints disagreed. But spaceships are rigid structures, made for hard usage and considerable stresses and strains. It weathered the hard landing, though the angle was slightly cocked due to the unevenness of the turf's hardness. The Haywire Queen was still space-worthy.
"Rotten pilot," muttered Hammond.
"Terrible," agreed McBride.
"Look, you two grinning apes. I missed Telfu by exactly one hundred and forty-four inches. Twelve feet in 2,630,000,000,000,000,000 feet. Well within the experimental error, I think."
"Twelve feet in nine light-years isn't bad," said McBride. "Some day, Larry, you can bend that mathematical mechanism you use instead of a brain into calculating whether the landing effect would have been worse at plus twelve feet instead of minus."
"A mere matter of kinetic energy dissipated—"
"Yeah, we know. Well, you didn't kill us," laughed Hammond. "So let's go out and take a look at the wonders of the Telfan scenery."
"Take a quick look," said McBride. "Here come some Telfans to take a look at some Terran science."