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Updated: May 6, 2025
And thereupon the television audience of several continents saw the faded-in image of mankind's first starship, poised upon its landing-fins among trees more splendid than even television shows had ever pictured before.
Al the pilot made frustrated gestures, not quite daring to leave his controls while there was even an outside chance the ship's landing-fins might find flaws in their support. Jones adjusted something on the new set of controls he had established for the extra Dabney field. Jones was not wholly normal in some ways.
So the strangeness of the morning to those who watched from the ship was more like the strangeness of an alien land on Earth than that of a wholly alien planet. The lower dawnmist thinned. Gazing down, Cochrane saw dark masses moving slowly past the ship's three metal landing-fins. They were the beasts of the night, moving deliberately from their bed-ground to the vast plains inland.
The ship had landed on bare stone, when Cochrane looked out the control-room ports. There had been trouble finding a flat space on which the three landing-fins would find a suitable foundation. It had taken half an hour of maneuvering to locate such a place and to settle solidly on it. Then the look of things was appalling.
Part of its foundation rested on almost-visible stone, only feet below the ground-level. But one of the landing-fins rested on humus. As the shocks passed, that fin-foot sank into the soft soil. The space-ship leaned perceptibly. Flying creatures darted back and forth above the tree-tops. Miles away, insensate violence reigned.
Cochrane matter-of-factly made the deal. There would be miniature extra-terrestrial animals on sale in all toy-shops within days. Spaceways, Inc., would collect a royalty on each toy sold. The rockets boomed, and lessened their noise, and wavered up and down again. Then there was that deliberate, crunching feel of the great landing-fins pressing into soil with all the ship's weight bearing down.
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