Planet explorer

Eons from now, MAN will hurtle through the void in gravity-defying ships across light-years of distance to far-flung planets ... and more staggering yet, he will COLONIZE these...

The face in the screen grumbled. Bordman swallowed. It was not a Survey officer's privilege to maintain discipline. And anyhow, there was no particular virtue in discipline here...

"There's been a call from the grid-control shack. It looks like there's something wrong, but they can't find anything. The grid is set for maximum power-collection, but it's bri...

The new idea was so promising that he regarded it with anguished unease for fear it would not hold up. It was an idea that really ought to change the facts resulting naturally f...

The ports cleared a little. Bordman could see the ground below more distinctly. There were patches of every tint that mineral coloring could produce, and vast stretches of tawny...

"For you," he told Bordman. "Those tanks are full of compressed air at rather high pressure--a couple of thousand pounds. Here's a reduction valve with an adiabatic expansion fe...

"Nights are cooler on all planets," said Bordman, "because every night the dark side radiates heat to empty space. There'd be frost everywhere every morning if the ground didn't...

There was a newly-made platform there. The sunlight was blindingly bright, the landscape an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his goggles to maximum darkness and stepped ginge...

"Loren Two Robot Installation--" Then Bordman said indignantly, "Don't tell me that that idiot skipper can have dropped me at the wrong place! This is Loren Two, isn't it? And t...

Crashings and rustlings, and snuffling sounds, and Sitka Pete came lumbering out into the clear space. He wore a harness too, and a pack. The harness was complex, because it had...

It was a hungry camp. They had come upon tiny rills upon occasion, flowing down the mountainside. Here the bears had drunk deeply and the men had filled canteens. But this was t...

"Why not?" demanded Huyghens impatiently. "When men make machines do what they want, that's all right. Even robots, when they're where they belong. But men will have to handle f...

"Thank you, sir! Hell hath no fury like a ranking officer caught in a blunder! He'd have twisted my tail for his mistake, sir, and it could have been bad!" Then he paused. He sa...

But nothing more happened. Nothing. Yet one could not be sure that some critical point had not been passed, so that from now on there would be a gradual rise in the creeping of...

Sandringham was in the act of listening to somebody in the phone-screen, who apparently was on the thin edge of hysteria. The brown dog was sprawled asleep on the rug.

"We floated ship-fuel solution over that swamp, Barnes, and let it stand. It has a high diffusion-rate. It went down into the mud.... And there came a day when the wind was righ...