Ground: A Deadly Puzzle in Alien Skies

Ground by Hal Clement - They were inside the sun, in a temperature of 900 Kelvin. With the refrigerators out there was only one wild chance to pull through.

The little ship plunged into the star.

If anyone had asked Jack Elder to justify his uneasiness, he could not have obliged. He might even have gone so far as to deny any such feeling; but he would not have been speaking the truth. He had every con- fidence in the refrigerators of the Wraith, untried as they were; he had helped design them; but the phrase, "Inside a star," which he had used sо casually in New York a few short weeks ago, now seemed to carry a more tangible-and deadly-implication.

Admittedly, the words had been a half truth, designed to impress an already awe-struck audience; the fringes of VV Cephei's far-flung atmosphere did technically constitute a portion of the giant sun, and he was certainly well within those fringes, but the environment was certainly not the raging hell of an atomic furnace which an unwary listener to his words might have been led to supрове. There was actually solid matter outside the spherical hull of the tiny interstellar traveler.

Elder sneaked a glance at the other men in the small cabin. Dressler, who had collaborated with him in the design of the heat-distributor, was looking at the recording dials pertaining to the device with every appearance of satisfaction. Snell, the astrophysicist, was sitting before the control board of his weird mass spectrograph that was mounted outside the hull, and periodically working knobs and switches that changed plates and altered the sensitivity regions of the device.