“Good,” said Black Bart, snapping off the intercom.
Mike exhaled gustily. His eyes were still on the needles that kept creeping higher and higher along the calibrated periphery of the meters. Many of them had long since passed the red lines that marked the allowable overload point. Mike the Angel knew that those points had been set low, but he also knew that they were approaching the real overload point.
He took another deep breath and held it.
Point for point, the continent of Antarctica, Earth, is one of the most deadly areas ever found on a planet that is supposedly non-inimical to man. Earth is a nice, comfortable planet, most of the time, but Antarctica just doesn’t cater to Man at all.
Still, it just happens to be the worst spot on the best planet in the known Galaxy.
Eisberg is different. At its best, it has the continent of Antarctica beat four thousand ways from a week ago last Candlemas. At its worst, it is sudden death; at its best, it is somewhat less than sudden.
Not that Eisberg is a really mean planet; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune can kill a man faster and with less pain. No, Eisberg isn’t mean—it’s torturous. A man without clothes, placed suddenly on the surface of Eisberg—anywhere on the surface—would die. But the trouble is that he’d live long enough for it to hurt.
Man can survive, all right, but it takes equipment and intelligence to do it.
When the interstellar ship Brainchild blew a tube—just one tube—of the external field that fought the ship’s mass against the space-strain of the planet’s gravitational field, the ship went off orbit. The tube blew when she was some ninety miles above the surface. She dropped too fast, jerked up, dropped again.