Jamison declaimed, wearing a throat-mike as Bell zestfully panned his camera and the ship swung down. It was an impressive broadcast. The rockets roared. With the coming of air about the ship, they no longer made a mere rumbling. They created a tumult which was like the growl of thunder if one were in the midst of the thunder-cloud. It was a numbing noise. It was almost a paralyzing noise. But Jamison talked with professional smoothness.
"This planet," he orated, while pictures from Bell's camera went direct to the transmitter below, "this planet is the first world other than Earth on which a human ship has landed. It is paradoxic that before men have walked on Mars' red iron-oxide plains and breathed its thin cold air, or fought for life in the formaldehyde gales of Venus, that they should look upon a world which welcomes them from illimitable remoteness. Here we descend, and all mankind can watch our descent upon a world whose vegetation is green; whose glaciers prove that there is air and water in plenty, whose very smoking volcanoes assure us of its close kinship to Earth!"
He lifted the mike away from his throat and framed words with his lips. "Am I still on?" Cochrane nodded. Cochrane wore headphones carrying what the communicator carried, as this broadcast went through an angled Dabney field relay system back to Lunar City and then to Earth. He spoke close to Jamison's ear.
"Go ahead! If your voice fades, it will be the best possible sign-off. Suspense. Good television!"
Jamison let the throat-mike back against his skin. The roaring of the rockets would affect it only as his throat vibrated from the sound. It would register, even so.
"I see," said Jamison above the rocket-thunder, "forests of giant trees like the sequoias of Mother Earth. I see rushing rivers, foaming along their rocky beds, taking their rise in glaciers. We are still too high to look for living creatures, but we descend swiftly. Now we are level with the highest of the mountains. Now we descend below their smoking tops. Under us there is a vast valley, miles wide, leagues long. Here a city could be built. Over it looms a gigantic mountain-spur, capped with green. One would expect a castle to be built there."
He raised his eyebrows at Cochrane. They were well in atmosphere, now, and it had been an obvious defect—condition—necessity of the Dabney field that both of its plates should be in a vacuum. One was certainly in air now. But Cochrane made that gesture which in television production-practice informs the actors that time to cutting is measured in tens of seconds, and he held up two fingers. Twenty seconds.
"We gaze, and you gaze with us," said Jamison, "upon a world that future generations will come to know as home—the site of the first human colony among the stars!"
Cochrane began to beat time. Ten, nine, eight—.
"We are about to land," Jamison declaimed. "We do not know what we shall find—What's that?" He paused dramatically. "A living creature?—A living creature sighted down below! We sign off now—from the stars!"