B whispers it was there a moment ago, it is pretty cloudy down there—Yes Lizzie there it is look.
And I see it. Over to the left, very faint and far below, a pin-prick of light.
Light in the polar wastes of a sparsely inhabited planet, and since we are still five miles up it is a very powerful light too.
No doubt about it, as we descend farther; about fifty miles from our objective there are men, quite a lot of them.
I think it is just then that I understand, really understand, the hazard of what we are doing. This is not an exercise. This is in dead earnest, and if we have missed an essential factor or calculated something wrong the result will be not a bad mark or a failed exam, or even our personal deaths, but incalculable harm and misery to millions of people we never even heard of.
Dead earnest. How in Space did we ever have cheek enough for this?
The lights might be the essential factor we have missed, but there is nothing we can do about them now.
Mr. Yardo suddenly chuckles and points to the screen.
"There you are, girlies! He's down!"
There, grayly dim, is the map the colonel showed us; and right on the faint line of the cliff-edge is a small brilliant dot.