He stared out where the planet must be, some million miles before us. Suddenly the tenseness relaxed from his face and he got the damndest expression of mixed incredulity, hopefulness and sorrow. Tears began welling from his eyes and streaming down the rugged contours of his cheeks.
It didn't add. Nor could I reason a motive for his laconic command: "Intersection orbit, Mr. Hulbert. We'll take her down," he said quietly. That was all. He hunched over the control board and moved things according to Mac's computations.
Soon I could make out the planet. We came in from an obtuse angle with its sun, so it showed first as a crescent of pale, green silver. Then it filled the viewing dome, and Mac began working the homing equipment. "May I acknowledge their message now, skipper?"
Larson shook his head with compressed lips.
"But if we are going in anyway—" Mac argued.
"No!" Larson exploded. Then his voice softened. "I think I know the mystery of the voice," he said. "It must be, it must be! But if it isn't—if I'm wrong—God alone knows. We must chance it. I don't want to know differently—until it's too late."
This was just real great. Larson had some fantastic notion, and he wanted it to be true so damned badly that he was taking us into blind jeopardy when we had the means to probe it first. Real scientific, that.
Humans! Men, and their so-called sense of reason! Larson was a crowning example of the sloppy-hearted thing I was fleeing when I embarked on this joy-ride, and now it would probably be my undoing.
We were homing in on the transmission from "New Columbia", easing down into the atmosphere, and now clouds and land and water formations took shape. The beam led us to the sunlit rim of dawn, and suddenly we were hovering over a great forest, slit at intervals with streaks of glittering blue that looked like deep, wide rivers.