Mike the Angel didn’t like the idea of having to land on Eisberg without jets any more than Multhaus did, but he was almost certain that the ship would take the strain.
He took the companionway up to the Control Bridge, went in, and handed the landing sheet to Black Bart. The captain scowled at it, shrugged, and put it on his desk.
“Will we make it, sir?” Mike said. “Any word from the Fireball?”
Black Bart nodded. “She’s orbiting outside the atmosphere. Captain Wurster will send down a ship to pick us up as soon as we’ve finished our business here.”
The Fireball, being much faster than the clumsy Brainchild, had left Earth later than the slower ship, and had arrived earlier.
“Now hear this! Now hear this! Third Warning! Landing orbit begins in one minute! Landing begins in one minute!”
Sixty seconds later the Brainchild began her long, logarithmic drop toward the surface of Eisberg.
Landing a ship on her jets isn’t an easy job, but at least an ion rocket is built for the job. Maybe someday the Translation drive will be modified for planetary landings, but so far such a landing has been, as someone put it, “50 per cent raw energy and 50 per cent prayer.” The landing was worse than the take-off, a truism which has held since the first glider took off from the surface of Earth in the nineteenth century. What goes up doesn’t necessarily have to come down, but when it does, the job is a lot rougher than getting up was.
The plasmasphere of Eisberg differed from that of Earth in two ways. First, the ionizing source of radiation—the primary star—was farther away from Eisberg than Sol was from Earth, which tended to reduce the total ionization. Second, the upper atmosphere of Eisberg was pretty much pure hydrogen, which is somewhat easier to ionize than oxygen or nitrogen. And, since there was no ozonosphere to block out the UV radiation from the primary, the thickness of the ionosphere beneath the plasmasphere was greater.
Not until the Brainchild hit the bare fringes of the upper atmosphere did she act any differently than she had in space.