A cruiser had appeared, and was very evidently intent on leading them somewhere, and Arcot followed it as it streaked through the dense air. "No wonder they streamline," he muttered as he saw the enormous force it took to drive the gigantic ship through this air. The air pressure outside their ship now was so great, that the sheer crushing effect of the air pressure alone was enormous. The pressure was well over nine tons to the square inch, on the surface of that enormous ship!
They landed approximately fifty miles from a large city which was the capital. The land seemed absolutely level, and the horizon faded off in distance in an atmosphere absolutely clear. There was no dust in the air at their height of nearly three hundred feet, for dust was too heavy on this world. There were no clouds. The mountains of this enormous world were not large, could not be large, for their sheer weight would tear them down, but what mountains there were were jagged, tortured rock, exceedingly sharp in outline.
"No rain—no temperature change to break them down," said Wade looking at them. "The zone of fracture can't be deep here."
"What, Wade, is the zone of fracture?" asked Torles.
"Rock has weight. Any substance, no matter how brittle, will flow if sufficient pressure is brought to bear from all sides. A thing which can flow will not break or fracture. You can't imagine the pressure to which the rock three hundred feet down is subject to. There is the enormous mass of atmosphere, the tremendous mass of rock above, and all forced down by this gravitation. By the time you get down half a mile, the rock is under such an inconceivably great pressure that it will flow like mud. The rock there cannot break; it merely flows under pressure. Above, the rock can break, instead of flowing. That is the zone of fracture. On Earth the zone of fracture is ten miles deep. Here it must be of the order of only five hundred feet! And the planetary blocks that made a planet's surface float on the zone of flowage—they determine the zone of fracture."
The gigantic ship had been sinking, and now, suddenly it gave a very unexpected demonstration of Wade's words. It had landed, and Arcot shut off the power. There was a roaring, and the giant ship trembled, rocked, and rolled along a bit. Instantly Arcot drove it into the air.
"Whoa—can't do it. The ship will stand it, and won't bend under the load—but the planet won't. We caused a Venone-quake. One of those planetary blocks Wade was talking about slipped under the added strain."
Quickly Wade explained that all the planetary blocks were floating, truly floating, and in equilibrium just as a boat must be. The added load had been sufficiently great, so that, with an already extant overload on this particular planetary block, this "boat" had sunk a bit further into the flowage zone, till it was once more at rest and balanced.
"They wish us to come out that they may see us, strangers and friends from another Island," interrupted Zezdon Afthen.
"Tell them they'd have to scrape us up off the ground, if we attempted it. We come from a world where we weigh about as much as a pebble here," said Wade, grinning at the thought of terrestrians trying to walk on this world.