It had been a long journey. Atwood contemplated it now as the round disc of the asteroid enlarged until it was beneath him, stretching all across the lower firmament; and he set his anti-gravity plates to resist his fall and verified that the repellent rocket-streams of electroidal gases were ready for the final atmospheric descent. By his calculation he would emerge from the clouds fairly close to the _Xarite_ purple glow. It would be early evening here. He recalled the details of Planetoid-150 which had been in the letter to him from his dead father. Meager details indeed. Dr. Paul Atwood had calculated the asteroid at between five and six hundred miles in diameter.
Then the clouds broke away. Atwood's heart was pounding as he stared down for his first real sight of the unknown world. At first it was a blur of deep purple radiance. It seemed to blind him, this weird glow to which his eyes were unaccustomed. But presently he could see better.
Ahead, the purple glow suffused the night with its faint but lurid sheen. Then his eyes seemed to grow accustomed to the purple so that he had the illusion of it fading a little with the details of the scene taking form. A broken forest stretched here--a strange, spindly form of purple and red vegetation. In places it grew a hundred feet or more high in a tangled, lush, solid mass of interwoven vines. There seemed no trees. It was all slender-stalked, spindly.
Atwood stared, amazed, puzzled. The forest, if it could be called that, grew in dense patches, interspersed with open spaces where there was apparently a little soil. Others were naked, gleaming masses of metallic rock. The forest patches swayed in a gentle night-breeze like marine vegetation in water. The stalks of the vines were thick with giant pods; balloon-like things twenty feet or more in length. It was as though gases of decomposing vegetation within them were lifting them so that their upward pull held erect the swaying, hundred-foot stalks.
Off in the distance, from the height at which he stared down, Atwood could see a thread of river. It gleamed dull purple-green, from the _Xarite_-glow, and the reflection of the cloud-light. The same glow of cloud-light shone on the forest-top.