Actually, Atwood cared very little what strange form of life might exist here on Planetoid-150. His was not a trip of scientific exploration. Now that the beginning of Interplanetary travel was at hand, he was willing to leave all that sort of thing to the professional scientists. His was a secret adventure, and so he had of necessity come alone. His purpose was to land on this unknown little world, and get a small quantity of the treasured Xarite. With that safely stored in the foot-long, insulated cylinder which now was ready to strap on his back, he would leave and get back to Earth as speedily as possible.
It had been a long journey. Atwood contemplated it now as the round disc of the asteroid enlarged until it was beneath him, stretching all across the lower firmament; and he set his anti-gravity plates to resist his fall and verified that the repellent rocket-streams of electroidal gases were ready for the final atmospheric descent. By his calculation he would emerge from the clouds fairly close to the Xarite purple glow. It would be early evening here. He recalled the details of Planetoid-150 which had been in the letter to him from his dead father. Meager details indeed. Dr. Paul Atwood had calculated the asteroid at between five and six hundred miles in diameter.
Then the clouds broke away. Atwood's heart was pounding as he stared down for his first real sight of the unknown world. At first it was a blur of deep purple radiance. It seemed to blind him, this weird glow to which his eyes were unaccustomed. But presently he could see better.
Ahead, the purple glow suffused the night with its faint but lurid sheen. Then his eyes seemed to grow accustomed to the purple so that he had the illusion of it fading a little with the details of the scene taking form. A broken forest stretched here—a strange, spindly form of purple and red vegetation. In places it grew a hundred feet or more high in a tangled, lush, solid mass of interwoven vines. There seemed no trees. It was all slender-stalked, spindly.
Atwood stared, amazed, puzzled. The forest, if it could be called that, grew in dense patches, interspersed with open spaces where there was apparently a little soil. Others were naked, gleaming masses of metallic rock. The forest patches swayed in a gentle night-breeze like marine vegetation in water. The stalks of the vines were thick with giant pods; balloon-like things twenty feet or more in length. It was as though gases of decomposing vegetation within them were lifting them so that their upward pull held erect the swaying, hundred-foot stalks.
Off in the distance, from the height at which he stared down, Atwood could see a thread of river. It gleamed dull purple-green, from the Xarite-glow, and the reflection of the cloud-light. The same glow of cloud-light shone on the forest-top.
Landing demanded all of Atwood's attention, so that after his first quick scrutiny of what lay down there, he looked about for a place to land. He headed for a dim open space in the forest, an almost level hundred-foot area seemingly of rocky soil.
Then, at last, he had landed; brought the forty-foot, narrow little ship down flat upon its spreading base fins. With air helmet beside him in the event this atmosphere was not breathable, he cautiously opened a pressure-exit porte. The cylinder's air did not go out. On the contrary, the outer pressure was greater, so that the planetoid's air came hissing in—a rush at first, then a filtering drift, and then it stopped.
Atwood's head reeled. He gripped his air-mask; then his head steadied and he discarded the mask. Breathable air. It was heavy; moist, aromatic with strange smells of the forest. But breathable. In a moment he hardly noticed its strangeness. In the silence, mingled with the thumping of his heart against his ribs, a low hum now was audible coming through the open porte. The voice of the forest. The blended hum of insect life. Was it that? He listened. It was a weird hum. So faint it seemed that he heard it within his head, rather than against his ear-drums. A tiny throbbing sound. But he seemed to know that it was vast. The blend of billions of still more tiny sounds. And queerly, it seemed hideous. A thing at which he should shudder. A thing of terror.