（外文电子版资料）A. Bertram Chandler - Jetsam.pdfVIP

JETSAM A. Bertram Chandler WITH DECEPTIVE EASE the rocket drifted down, down, the flare of her exhaust vivid against the black sky, the long, downreaching streamer of incandescent gas stirring the fine pumice dust to a coruscating flurry, then, as she lost still more altitude, fusing the almost impalpable powder to a slag that glowed red, red beneath crusty, thickening gray, for minutes after her passing. Auxiliary jets flared briefly, fiercely, to kill her lateral drift. Again they flared, and a third time. The rocket was all of ten feet above the almost featureless surface when, suddenly main and auxiliary jets went out like a snuffed candle. She fell—but with an odd, almost nightmarish slowness. She landed as silently as she had come, tilting heavily at first, then slightly, first one way and then the other as the powerful, fluid-damped springs, not unlike the recoil mechanism of a piece of artillery, took the weight and the shock and, after the preliminary swaying and quivering, allowed her to assume an upright position. She stood there, then, gleaming in the harsh sunlight, a bright ovoid suspended in to tripod that was her vaned landing gear. She should, perhaps, have looked strange, alien—but she did not. She was as much part of the scheme of things as the plain of pumice dust, as the ring craters, as the serrated ridge of the distant mountain range above which hung, seeming almost to touch the jagged peaks, looming huge in the black, diamond-spangled sky, the great, cloudy opal that was Earth. She was new and bright, her shell plating barely scarred by her swift, screaming passage through the atmosphere of her mother world —but she belonged. She was new, the first of her kind—but the dream was old, old. She was part of the dream. Inside the rocket, inside the cramped living cabin that was also the