The heavy ship shuddered to a stop five feet above the ramp....
Joe wiped the sweat from his forehead and dropped into his chair.
"Brother! Someday his tubes are going to misfire when he tries that, and the Lorelei is going to be spread from here to Marsport!"
The radar man did not answer immediately. He was still standing at the dome, his mouth slightly agape, staring at the stubby ship that now lay silent in Ramp Four. He pulled himself together, closed his mouth with a click, and moved back to the sweep screen.
"Who the hell is that guy?"
"You've heard of Pop Gillette. Everybody in space has. Anytime you want to tell a whopper about space, all you have to say is, 'I remember one time when Pop Gillette and me was out around so-and-so....' And whatever nutty place you name, he's probably really been there, and whatever nutty thing you can think of to happen, it probably really did happen to him."
The radar man nodded in recognition, and Joe went on.
"Like the time he got mad at the people at White Sands Port. One night he goosed an asteroid down right in the middle of their main landing strips. The damn thing was a quarter of a mile long, and almost as high. How he got it down through the atmosphere, nobody knows, but he did ... and he landed it so gently that nobody knew anything about it until they looked out their windows the next morning. They finally got the Patrol on him, and told him the asteroid was legally his, so he had to think of a way to get rid of it. He did. Turned out to be laced with uranium, so he rented the whole darned field for a month, cut the thing up and carted it away. Sold it for a fortune."