BOB SHAW Amphitheatre
The retro-thrusters were unpleasantly fierce in operation, setting up vibrations which Bernard Harben could feel in his chest cavity.
He had little knowledge of engineering, but he could sense the stress patterns racing through the structure of the shuttle craft, deflecting components and taking them close to their design limits. In his experience, all machines—especially his cameras—gave of their best when treated with the utmost gentleness, and he wondered briefly how the shuttle pilot could bear to subject his craft to such punishment. Every man to his trade, he thought, for the moment incapable of originality, and as if to reward him for his faith the precisely timed burst of power came to an abrupt end. The shuttle was falling freely, in sweet silence.
Harben looked upwards through the crystal canopy and saw the triple cylinder of the mother ship, the Somerset, dwindling to a bright speck as it slid ahead on its own orbit. The shuttle was brilliantly illuminated from above by the sun, and from below by the endless pearl-white expanses of the alien planet, which meant that every detail of it stood out with a kind of phosphorescent clarity against the background of space. Up at the front end the pilot was almost hidden by the massive back of his G-seat. He sat without moving, yet controlling their flight. Harben felt an ungrudging admiration for his skill, and for the audacity which enabled him to drive a splinter of metal and plastics down through the all-enveloping cloud layers to a predestined point on an unknown world.
. . .
