Gallagher shook his head. "Evaporate," he said. "I sort of think we may be on Betsy Ann for a while, and it's better to leave the Glacier here in deep freeze."

  I did a quick calculation in my head and nodded. "So you can extend a parking orbit quite a long time out here," I said, "and not be using any power."

  While I sat thinking, Gallagher was inching us into orbit, correcting and recorrecting in an attempt to perfect our swing around the ice world. Then, just as he was making a final maneuver, there was a feminine voice on the radio and a red light on the control panel.

  Gallagher reached over and switched on the radio transmitter. His voice crackled out, "Damn it, sheer that taxi away until I get this berg properly in orbit. You're overloading my detectors."

  "Sorry, honey, but has it occurred to you that you might be overloading my detectors, too? I was doing a scientific—"

  "Scientific be damned. I'm glad you're here anyhow. You can give us a lift back to Betsy Three."

  "Okay, Gallagher."

  Gallagher hadn't mentioned his name, and how the pilot of the other ship knew who it was, I wasn't sure. Of course, Gallagher was the only one in space that as running around in an iceberg for a ship, but it hardly seemed to me that anybody on a security watch would simply take it for granted that it was Gallagher's ship. I said as much, but Gallagher only laughed.

  "You're perfectly right, Harold, if that were all of it. But I assure you that we've got just as good IFFs on our ships as any that the corporations have on theirs."

  I felt deflated. Of course, no traffic pattern would be set up without proper "Identification, Friend or Foe" transponders, if only because they make the operation of computer controllers much simpler.

  To hide my discomfort, I began fiddling with the dials on the telescreen that showed a picture of nearby space, and almost at once I managed to overlap the red blinking dot with an actual picture of the taxi. Suddenly I strained forward. "Hey, that's not a taxi. That's—"

  "A nickel-steel meteor," Gallagher finished for me dryly, "though you can't properly call it a meteor, until it actually touches atmosphere."

  I held onto my voice for a moment, but then it came out in spite of me. "Crude construction," I said, though not haughtily. I'd learned at least that much. "Seems like you like to use space debris for transportation."

  "Nothing like using what's handy," he answered laconically, "though it won't be a ship long."

  He pushed the button for a final maneuver and then checked the orbit. Satisfied, he turned back to the radio and lit up the screen.

  It lighted to show a freckle-faced girl probably not over sixteen. The rest of her, under a tight pair of coveralls, gave her about twenty years, possibly a few more.

  "Okay, Cricket," Gallagher said, "you can taxi on in now."

  "You forgot to turn on your homing signal," she told him cheerfully. "Should I home in on you as a derelict for practice, or are you going to make it easy for me?"

  "Didn't think you'd need a signal after that last contact," he said, switching it on. "However, you have it now. I'd hate to try your guesstimating too far."

  The ship ranged in fast and soon we were shoving out the air lock. A few spuuuts on our suit rockets put us up against a tiny corridor cut into the meteor; it was hardly more than a slit capable of accommodating us one at a time. Not far back, the corridor went through an air lock and then broadened into a chamber. There was the girl at the controls; nobody else was in sight, and there was no exit except the one we'd come in by. She was a pretty thing, but seemed very young. She gestured to us to strap down on foam mats on the floor beside her couch, since obviously the ship was not equipped for the convenience of passengers. Gallagher took off his helmet and I followed his lead. "Good to see you back, Dublin," she said, as he stretched out on the foam mat, strapping down. I followed suit.

  "This is Harald Dundee," he said, "former captain in the Solspace Merchant Fleet. He's stopping off for a visit on his way through to Earth to complain to the Space Commission about how one of the colonies was being run."

  She nodded noncomittally in my direction and said, "Hold on." She shifted us into drive, a type of drive I wasn't expecting. I felt like somebody had just stepped on me with a twelve-foot shoe. The foam beneath me squeezed thin and dropped me into a pocket that I couldn't have gotten out of if I'd wanted to.

  It went on that way for the best part of twenty minutes and then slacked off to a more standard pressure. Then the girl locked the board, got out of her acceleration couch and said, "How about some food?"

  My system was telling me how many things it wanted to get rid of before it went through something like that again, and I made a quick dash for the 'fresher.

  The whole structure, as far as I could tell, was a prefabricated unit that could accommodate three people in a pinch, but was designed for a one-man operation. I realized that it was simply shoved into a hole that passed through the center of gravity of the asteroid.

  "This thing isn't really designed as a ship, is it?" I asked as I joined them in the tiny galley.

  "Well now, that depends on how you look at it." Gallagher waved his hand around the compact compartment. "The power unit here is well designed for the purpose. But the purpose, as you may have guessed, is to come out here and pick up chunks of nickel-steel that we need back on Betsy Three. It's not particularly difficult to bore a hole in just the right place and set the drive unit right into it. Then it becomes a rather slow and cumbersome ship. But take the same drive unit without this hull, and it's a damn' fast pice of machinery."

  The trip wasn't as brief as I had expected it to be, because we were using one of the most basic drives that have ever been built, a simple rocket-power device operated on nuclear energy. It took us nearly two weeks in the cramped quarters to get to Betsy Three.

  Gallagher and the girl knew each other so well that they didn't bother to use names and it took me two days to find out that Cricket's name was Mary Joinson.

  After discovering her name, I asked her a question.

  "How do you land these things anyhow?"

  "We fly them down, of course."

  My estimate of weight came up and hit me over the head at that point. It didn't matter how many gees it was good for, one simply didn't land fifty or a hundred million tons of steel all in one chunk.

  As I thought about it, I broke out in a cold sweat. A

  chunk of steel that size wouldn't have area enough compared to its mass to slow down appreciably in any atmosphere I'd ever heard of. Even if it came out of orbit at a considerably lower velocity than any I thought would be practical, the thing would make a big dent wherever it hit.

  "I think I'd rather get out and walk," I said.

  "Well, okay. If you insist, we'll give you a parachute."

  Somehow the landing operation that would be upcoming got to be a standard joke. I kept advancing theories of how such a chunk could be landed, and they kept shooting holes in them. By the time we had reached the planet and Gallagher and I were told to lie down on the acceleration mats, I was in a real sweat. I was convinced that there was no way at all to land a chunk of steel and that we were all on the verge of suicide. The fact that Cricket had landed such a craft, by her own statement, a number of times, helped intellectually, but it didn't do a thing for the autonomic sensors in my stomach that kept telling me I was about to die at the hands of a girl-child who was at the controls of a real spaceship, instead of the toy one she should have been playing with.

  She didn't say much. She just alerted somebody that we were coming in.

  Gallagher seemed relaxed.

  As a method of easing my nervousness, I kept trying to stare at the unpainted wall of the tiny chamber, but my eyes kept straying back past Cricket's youthful figure towards the dials. There was nothing for me to hear but the susurrus ventilating fan and the ship's radio.

  I had forced my attention back to the wall, seeking some imperfection to focus on, when I was brought back sharply by a raucous voice on the radio.

  "Ground Control to Taxi X-9. That's a good orbit, Cricket, but you're about nine kilometers too high."

  "Okay, Ground Control. Dropping nine kilo."

  I gasped and clenched my teeth as Cricket's nimble fingers danced across the board and I felt a crunch of drive thrust that nearly put me through the floor, followed by the sensation of the ship swinging in free fall; then there was another crunch. The reassuring chatter of the radio penetrated my self-centered attention.

  "That's good. Locked on. We've got you, Cricket. Cut drive." With each radio phrase there was Cricket's calm reply.

  I didn't understand those particular communications, but that didn't bother me. We were safely in orbit now, scarcely a hundred kilometers above the surface. I was relaxed and waiting for the order to unstrap.

  Things went wrong with the feel again, and my gaze jumped to the dials.

  "We're falling!" I gasped. "Falling like a rock!"

  Gallagher's voice penetrated my preoccupation; he was calm and unconcerned. "Relax, Dundee. We're being landed by a new system we use on this planet."

  The girl was obviously going to do nothing. While I reassured myself that she and Gallagher were aboard, too, and surely not risking their lives in what appeared to me suicidal inactivity, there was, obviously, something that I didn't understand. I clenched my teeth and tried to convince all my senses that the ship was under some kind of control I didn't know about and that all was well. Intellect doesn't control the sweat glands or the adrenals, though, and I was slippery with sweat and jittery with adrenalin, and tingling.

  I suddenly realized that I was tingling with a tingle induced from an external source and that I'd been feeling it for some time. The tingle was building up to a resonance point in the meteor itself; the whole thing rang like a gong. The sound went on and on, and then tapered off into a tingle again. And I heard Cricket's calm voice speaking into the radio.

  "First resonance point."

  My intellect got a bit more control over my autonomic system then. Whatever landing procedure was in use was at least familiar to those in charge. There was some faint hope in the back of my mind that we weren't about to be killed.

  The R.A.I, began to show a distinct decline over the last few moments and was no longer tripping into the red; and my gaze went to the navigation scope.

  The planetary image that it presented was roughly that of a half moon, with a terminator, probably the dawn line, almost directly beneath us. We were swinging into the night side.

  As I watched, the progress of the terminator across the planetary disk slowed and slowed, and there was still a bare limb of light showing by the time it paused and moved slightly back. The main visible feature of the planet had become a lightning storm immediately beneath us.

  The storm began to swell with our descent, and the intermittent flashes of lightning that had at first appeared to be a bar fanned out into a coil, a shaped funnel, beneath us. Again, my whole being was assaulted by the audible effect of the meteor going into resonance with some external force, and then we were beneath the top of the storm and I could see that it was not a storm, but an orderly network of electrical flashes coiling around us and pulsing as though we were riding a loudspeaker.

  The sound went on and on, and in the navigation scope faint features of the planetary surface were becoming visible; the bowl-shaped horizon was swinging up and around us.

  Then we were down with only the faintest of jars. The altimeter read zero.

  I must have been shaking and white as a sheet, but through my daze I heard Cricket's voice.

  "Okay, Ground Control, we're down. Check ejection orientation."

  "Ejection orientation is on target/' the radio assured her. "Proceed with ejection."

  I was trying to find my voice to ask Gallagher what they were talking about, when a heavy blow slammed into the entire surface of my body and I was crushed under acceleration as though I were being launched by a primitive rocket.

  Then we were falling. There was a distinct splash and a reorientation; the control room settled into a quiet bobbing motion on its side. Gallagher, Cricket and I were strapped to our mats and couch against a wall, the controls were on the floor, and the bulkhead was the ceiling.

  I stayed there shaking, until the inner bulkhead swung down and the handholds on its outer surface were ready to serve as a ladder.

  A voice called down, "Okay, you guys, you can come out now."

  Gallagher and Cricket had got themselves unstrapped and were stepping carefully across the controls. I couldn't seem to find the buckles, and with a tinkle of laughter our young captain reached over and helped me unstrap as though I were a typical passenger.

  "Come on, big boy," she said, "time to get your ground legs working."

  Then Gallagher heaved himself up the ladder, and the whole cabin swayed in response to his motion. My feet nearly swayed out from under me.

  "Steady as she goes. We'll be out of this tube in a minute."

  With a steadying hand, Mary helped me towards the bulkhead, and I scrambled up, finding a short rope ladder within my reach and a walkway at the top of it.

  Outside, I realized that the walkway was on a crane, its huge arm extending above me. Magnetic grapples were firmly secured to the tiny, tubular cabin which was floating in a small body of water. The cabin was scarcely more than a piece of stovepipe expanded to accommodate the cargo of people.

  The meteorite itself was nowhere in sight.

  VI

  The place was alive; there seemed a special zest in the air. There's a difference in the people too. On Earth, one was a citizen of this or that and a member of this or that, but spoke of they when referring of the factors that really control life on the planet.

  On Betsy Ann, every individual owned the planet; it was theirs. They didn't speak of they, they spoke of we. It has a different sound.

  We were sitting in a workmen's canteen, on a rise overlooking the port, or industrial complex; I'm not sure which is the better term.

  I was beginning to understand the theory behind the landing, not only meteors of the size we'd come in on, but also of interstellar ships, even if they are as delicate as eggs. I was as impressed as a schoolboy; I'd been expecting a primitive economy.

  It was a primitive economy, in a way, for it was spotty. There hadn't been time yet to produce tools for consumer goods, but they were underway in directions Earth hadn't dreamed of for generations.

  The landing system was from what Gallagher called their solar tap. They were tapping the electric potential that exists between a planet and the belts of ionized particles caught in the planet's magnetic field. The landing system was part of a larger system that produced, from one site, enough electricity to power the entire continent on a broadcast basis.

  Earth hadn't had broacast power, though it was known, because the production of power was geared to installations that didn't have sufficient potential to use the airwaves for more than communications, such as Tri-D. But the power potential in the solar tap was so great that it could be thrown away on an inverse-square basis and still run anything thousands of miles distant, from a manufacturing complex to a skimmer.

  The landing system was a gigantic web of laser beams, angled upwards and focused to create a huge electrical discharge spiral that used magnetic induction and repulsion to bring the meteors in. They could bring in any metallic ship as well on the huge spiral, even though the interstellar ships were comparatively fragile, for the gentle cradle of the magnetic induction-repulsion system could raise or lower ships as evenly as a freight elevator might bring down a crate of delicate electronic equipment.

  The solar-tap landing system was a magnificent sight, and as long as I was on Betsy Ann I never ceased to be caught into a tremendous awe and delight when it was turned on. It wasn't turned on now. Only the one beam from atop the central pyramid pulsed its broadcast power and sang its deep-throated song.

  There was a central pyramid supplying power on each of the three continents of Betsy Ann, I was told; those would soon be supplemented with satellite pyramids needed to create landing systems on each continent. Meantime, the equipment needed to convert Betsy Ann from a desert planet into a lush, green one could operate anywhere on broadcast power.

  "But why haven't they gotten this on Earth?" I finally asked.

  "Stop-motion thinking," Gallagher answered, "Bureaucratic, cosmocorp, governmental thinking. Anyhow, Earth's already built a steel-frame civilization, and she'd have to use some real know-how to introduce a tap without frying people because of the resonance factor. It's best to stick to stone or plastic buildings when you're using a tap."

  "But where's the meteor we came down in, and what's your plan for it?" I asked. "That's plenty of steel."

  "Over there." He pointed to where I could see a glow in the sky at the center of the port complex. "We can use steel; we just use it with know-how."

  I stared at the glow in the sky. "Surely it couldn't have been that hot?"

  "The glow? That's not the meteor, that's the melting tap in operation. But the meteor did come in at a red heat, at least in its surface layers. You see, we land them in the furnace. As soon as everybody's clear, they change the frequency of the induction current and start melting them down. It saves quite a bit of time, and time's our most precious commodity. The energy we're not worried about; that we've got in plenty. But it takes time to reheat, and if the ejection mechanism doesn't work, it's a two or three hours' setback to lose the heat that was built up during descent, so that we can get the people out, and then we have to reheat the darned thing so we can melt it down."

  "Isn't that a rather expensive way to get steel?" I asked.

  He grinned. "You're fust not used to the idea of real planetary power," he said. "Those meteors can be brought in, melted down, and ready to use for tools at a cost per ton of, say, a hundredth of a solar credit."