longer stay in the air on momentum, he tripped the parachute lever.
He could hear its opening boom through the hull, and the shock almost cut him in
two on the safety belt. Swaying like a pendulum, the Icarus settled after twelve
years on the surface of its home planet–from sterile desert to empty
wilderness. Abruptly Gregory Marshall felt very tired. Dully he watched the
green roof rise to meet him.
Then he was rocked violently and branches crashed outside–another dull
shock–and the Icarus swayed gently back and forth on the end of the tangled
shrouds, perhaps a yard from the ground.
“The Earth won’t have me,” he thought, smiling without humor. He unstrapped
himself, and the entrance-port wheel squealed in his hands.
For a moment he stood beside his suspended flyer, breathing deeply of the heady
air, wine-like after Mars and the canned stuff in the ship. The strange, subtle
odor of green things was everywhere, and when he stamped his feet on the rich
black sod he knew again a long-forgotten natural weight. Home. Home changed very
terribly, but still life after living death.
He sighed and gave the Icarus a short inspection. There was a tiny fraction of
gritty red sand wedged in a crack where the tubes joined the fuselage, and the
knowledge that it was Martian gave him a greater sensation of awe than all the
films stored in the cabin. Nothing seemed to be damaged; the lightness of the
steel-strong wood composition had protected it from coming to grief among the
small trees. He whistled softly to himself and ran his fingers along a long,