At ten miles he listened for man-made radiation. There was nothing in the electromagnetic spectrum but the crackling of static in an electric storm which might be a thousand miles away. At five miles height the nearest-object indicator, near the bottom of its scale, wavered in a fashion to prove that he was still moving laterally across mountainous country. He swung the ship and killed that velocity, too.
At two miles he used the rockets for deceleration. The pencil-thin flame reached down for an incredible distance. By naked-eye observation out a port he tilted the fiercely-roaring, swiftly-falling ship until hillsides and forests underneath him ceased to move. By that time he was very low indeed.
He reached ground on a mountainside which was lighted by the blue-white flame of the rocket-blast. He chose an area in which the tree tops were almost flat, indicating something like a plateau underneath. Murgatroyd was practically frantic by this time because of his capture and the pinching of his tail, but Calhoun could not spare time to release him. He let the ship down gently, gently, trying to descend in an absolutely vertical line.
If he didn't do it perfectly, he came very close. The ship settled into what was practically a burned-away tunnel among monstrous trees. The high-velocity slender flame did not splash when it reached ground. It penetrated. It burned a hole for itself through humus and clay and bedrock. When the ship touched and settled, there was boiling molten stone some sixty feet underground, but there was a small scratching sound as it came to rest. A flame-amputated tree-limb rubbed tentatively against the hull.
Calhoun turned off the rockets. The ship swayed slightly and there were crunching noises. Then it was still on its landing fins.
"Now," said Calhoun, "I can take care of you, Murgatroyd."
He flicked on the switches of the exterior microphones—much more sensitive than human ears. The radiation-detectors were still in action. They reported only the cracklings of the distant storm.
But the microphones brought in the moaning of wind over nearby mountaintops, and the almost deafening susurrus of rustling leaves. Underneath these noises there was a bedlam of other natural sounds. There were chirpings and hootings and squeaks, and the gruntings made by native animal life. These sounds had a singularly peaceful quality. When Calhoun toned them down to be no more than background-noises, they suggested the sort of concert of night-creatures which to men has always seemed an indication of purest tranquility.
Presently Calhoun looked at the pictures the photorecorder had taken while the telescope's field swept over the city. It was the colony-city reported to have been begun two years before, to receive colonists from Dettra Two. It was the city of the landing grid which had tried to destroy the Med Ship as a dog kills a rat—by shaking it to fragments, some fifty thousand miles in space. It was the city which had made Calhoun land with his vision-plates blinded, that had made him pretend his ship was internally a wreck: which had drained his power-reserves of some hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours of energy. It was the city which had made his return to Med Headquarters impossible.